The Adjustment League (30 page)

Through them I score vertical lines, top to bottom, four of them, about two inches apart.

For a brief time, as the lines go bright red and, dabbing with the shirt, I can keep up with the bleeding, my chest is a crimson checkerboard. But the flow increases and, even blotting quickly, it becomes a general smear.

Later, when it has stopped and crusted over, I clean up the boxes with water and alcohol as best I can. But I can't get too close to the lines without reopening them. So the grid effect is crude, and bumpy. Rust-coloured now, too. Not bright anymore.

Staring down at it, I feel a clammy kinship, almost an identity, with the blood-soaked old ghoul curled in his chair—as if Judy's bone-handled carving knife, as weirdly magic as the rest of her, operates in two dimensions and at two different speeds, opening one man's throat as I watched, and now, a half day later more or less, completing the job remotely, slicing the chest of his doppel-target… wound without end, amen.

Mid-afternoon, I pick up
Around Toogood Pond
and read some passages from near the end.

It's no longer possible to tell myself I'm reading it because it's part of an adjustment. Or because it tells me things—suggestions, hints—about a man who interests me, who is a mystery I can't resolve.

I'm reading it for company. To preserve my connection to a human shore I'm leaving, swept on a current that was always there but which is quickening, surging for open water.

Faces 23 August

Yesterday a quiet day. It felt as if we were out walking on a long thin peninsula, narrowing as it went, far away from the long shoreline of her life. She asked me questions that were—I was going to say terrible in their extremity; but that is not how they felt. A sweetness suffuses anything so utter.

“Was this my husband?” She had moved the photo of their wedding dinner to her bedside table. She seems to rotate her pictures according to what needs to be brought forward, brought back—taking the best care she can of her diminishing stores of recollection. “And is that the same man?” Of a photo taken a few years later. “Uh… huh,” she says when I show her one of a family dinner. That strains credulity, the middle-aged men and the elderly married couple.

Once, early on in Vivera, she turned to me, and with a curious shy courtesy, said, “You've always lived very alone, I guess. Tell me, did you have any help from your mother and father?” “You're my mother,” I said. And she looked startled, and covered it with a laugh. But she knew what had happened—in that moment she did. In fact she said, “That's what's happening to me. I forgot for a moment you're my son. I thought you were just a nice gentleman. Helping me.”

I felt challenged more than saddened. For fifty-two years she has given me abundant notice of my identity. It's time now to be a nice gentleman.

Guide lines 16 December

What I say, carefully, wanting to get it right for myself too: “The thought I'm guided by is that this lady has been disrespected enough. However late in the day it is, it's not too late to give her the treatment she deserves. The buck stops here.”

That seems to satisfy L. She nods. And it satisfies me too, I realize. It's a guideline to try to hold to.

Vivid dream again last night of trying to kill him. With a long knife, flashing in the sun, as we splashed and floundered in a stream of variable depth.

After hearing me talk of the sudden waves and longer spells of dislocation, of dream-likeness—leading to disorientation:
Where am I? How did I get here? What am I doing now and what am I supposed to do next?
—Dr. P gives me a name for it (which helps). “It's called de-realization.”

It can be a consequence of anxiety, apparently, often related to post-traumatic stress.

And I told a story about a man I'd known who discovered, in his mid-twenties, that he'd been adopted. That his parents, with whom he'd had and continued to have a warm relationship, were not his blood parents. He felt, he told me, the ground shift and dissolve under his feet. So that even elements of ordinary reality became dubious, became things he couldn't be sure of: chair, table, wall. Who he was. Who the person next to him was.

Hours later I realized—it seeped into my awareness—that there was no such man in my real life. He was a figure slid in from dream: more true than real, more honest than a lie.

A curious book, Sandor's.
Curiouser and curiouser
each time I read it.

Sipping Luck Yu on the balcony, staring above Latimer brick, I consider it. Chill cobalt, with low, shouldering gray clouds. No witches on broomsticks sailing before them yet.

A man caring for his mother. Suffering with her, devoted to her. Then not.

A man flailing, while analyzing his flailing.

Different men, not quite matchable. Slides that don't quite overlay, not exactly.
Do anyone's?
More or less. You can be scattered but still of a piece, sort of. Glob of mercury dropped, running off in tiny beads. But this guy—this
author
—with loud leviathan in the bar, trouble cresting from his deeps?

Is this what writing means, Lois?

To stop no pain, but comment on it sensitively?

To be a dolt, but deftly.

Atrocious pastime. And nothing in it to declare—only to strongly hint, to tantalize—that he knew anything about the mayhem in the family vaults. All that induced paralysis and rape. Did they, too, speak to the poem?

And L—Lynette, as I gather now—the one he confides in, is consoled by. And? What more? Listening to his trials, does she tell him of her own on a locked ward? Tell him of Judy? Me? TAL?
How could she?
How could she not?

Close my eyes. Shift my hands to grasp new, cooler sections of the railing.

Breathe. Slowly.
In, out
. In, out.

A kind of gray. A shadow world… but without features.

No stairs. No Empress.

No nothing.

Mid-afternoon, I give up and enter the empty in Big Empty. Sit in the cool, back to the wall. Pull the door closed. Megan's closet. Her dark. Though it draws me like a lodestone through each window, I resist its pull as long as I can. Knowing that when I reach it, Stone waits just beyond.

It's all right to be here. You've waited long enough
.

Desperation the price of admission. It's all she ever asked of you. Street sweeps, endless drives and walks in search of, circling, backtracking, peering—futile, yes, of course, but essential. Pointlessly crucial.
Need
more than a word. Not just four simple letters, a burped syllable.

More than that or nothing at all.

Reaching, moving my hands about, I feel them. Feel her colours.

Red. Green. Yellow. Orange. Blue. Purple.

Redyelloworange, crisscrossing slashes of flame. Her
far cors
. What she loved best.

Touch them, gently. Feel them. Sitting with your back against the wall, your knees drawn up. A small dark space. The only space in No Name with no name.

Closet
does for strangers.

I found them one day with a flashlight, looking for something before I emptied it. I doubt if Lois ever saw them.

How did Megan find her way in here? And when?

Found a few moments when she could be alone and came in here. Reached up to shut the door behind her. Not afraid of the dark, wanting it. Needing it. Needing it to reach up—as high as she could, tiptoe—and slash upon it.

Feel them!
Fiercer than any colours in sunlight could be. Burning to the touch.

Far cors!

Our fierce arguments that last fall. Fiercer than I realized as we were having them, since even war was giddy life.
She's Daddy's girl all right.
Lois sneering but afraid. Our child listless, sitting sunk for hours in torpor, her eyes dim and unfocused. Then, with Lois still murmuring suspicions of autism, clambering up to stand on a chair, waving her arms wildly, screaming with glee. Screaming herself hoarse. Lois with her hand over her mouth, eyes wide. She knows these things, lives with them. Mad ecstatic dances, trance-paralysis in caves. Daddy's girl.

Smashing the crayons into paper so hard they broke into bits. Racing the bits across paper and onto the floor.

Far cors!

Fire colours, honey?

Far cors!!

A magical place, even the air feels electric.

You can hear another voice, every other voice, sensible and friendly, saying, Just a child reaching up with short chubby arms and scrawling with her crayons. Random, the voices say.

Hear them and know, calmly, with no need to repudiate, that the marks are far more purposeful. Are a map. Uncanny. Precise.

Map to where she was. Is.

Map to where we are.

Colours burning in the dark
.

§

Jared and his parents return around 9:00. It's the first time ever he's wanted to join Trick-or-Treat. Brave the streets when recess is everywhere. Lucy teared up when she told me. Tuesday's door-bangers aside, she still considers me her staunchest ally in strengthening Jared for a normal life. But our purposes, I know guiltily, diverge. I want to strengthen Jared for himself. Wherever that may lead. To people… or away from them.

He shows me his pillow case, half-full. They went everywhere. His plastic, head-to-toe outfit is expensive. Costly for Lucius and Lucy, even at Walmart. Alien superhero that will have a special name, special powers, but which to me looks utterly generic. Breastplate. Talons. Helmet with battery-powered blinking knobs. Cape. Gold. Red. Black. Blue belt with flashing red tips hanging from a yellow “weapons cache.”

I nod, try to be glad for him. Get partway there.

More power in his lichen-munching snail than in warehouses of this dreck
.

My days as his tutor may be numbered.

No Name's real Trick-or-Treat begins soon after, a farce of activity on the steps and sidewalk. 305's new couple pull up with their helpers, even though I warned them three times today—until I stopped answering their calls—that the cruise shippers had till midnight by law and would likely take every minute. They'd be better advised to wait until morning and move in leisurely.

“They can't take
all day
.”

“They've
got
all day.”

That deep furrowed silence from the other end—someone struggling to fathom that
what I want
and
what's coming to me
do not precisely coincide.

Sure enough, the minstrels start around 10:00 and take their surly time about it. Ferrying small armloads of practice amps and a shower curtain and an LCBO box with the bottom going and an unwashed cereal bowl teetering on top. One chubby girl passes carrying a music stand. More naïve or sentimental eyes, watching this, might surmise they're seeing the artistic temperament out of which creativity rises and for which allowances must be made. But I know I'm seeing the asshole temperament out of which nothing but bullshit rises and for which there is no excuse. Prolonging an eviction is the best number these birds have.

I stay on the kitchen chair, pig's head on a stick, eyeing them through black slits. Let three skinny guys lever a couch around me, almost losing it down the stairwell. A van pulls up around 11:00 beside their piles and they lean against it, yukking it up with the driver, jerking thumbs up at me. It's Hallowe'en, all right. Dull lethargic devils who know they've got till the stroke of 12:00 to harass and goad the townspeople, try to drive them blind with rage.

Meanwhile the new saints, more than halfway to rage when they arrived, fidget by their rented U-Haul, stalk five steps forward and back, huddle griping with their oversupply of helpers: two hired movers (leaning against their truck, smoking), three parents, a muscular friend or brother. They chatter, mope, cast unremarked glares at the dawdling minstrels.

Twice the guy opens the door and holds a wrist up at me, tapping a big watch. I tap my own bare wrist, no watch on it now.
Mid-night
, I growl down through my mask.

I keep expecting the cops to come through the glass doors below. Dressed like adults on their way to a party, their costumes perfect.

By now they've had several hours to sweat Max over the pictures. Several hours, when minutes is all it would take to have him squealing like Gainsborough's Blue Boy getting a hot lead enema. Vivian! he starts yelping. And she's there now, in another room. Though how it helps his case to have an accomplice he employs and fucks and poses and, apparently, drugs—it would take a panicking pampered dentist to fathom.

The Super! he squeals next—or first. I don't
know
his name. He never
told
me. The
Super
, is all.
The Super made me do it!
It makes no sense, of course. How did I make him do for years what they've got evidence of copied multiply: drugging women and girls in his dentist's chair, undressing and assaulting them, photographing them, passing the pics to his father and who knows who else? But he
can
say I tried to extort money from him and he sent me to his father to straighten me out—all true, so long as English walks a tightrope. He can put me at the scene of a murder, and maybe he thinks, with flailing logic, if he gives them a murderer they'll overlook, or go easy on, serial drugged sexual assaults.

Minutes stretch like days—the chair is hard, the light is harsh, the room is hot, his questioners smell and have yellow teeth—body and soul, he's in
pain
—and he can squeal and yelp a lot before his high-priced lawyer gets there and gives him the excellent advice he's paid for: shut the fuck up.

But the cops don't arrive. Just Darth Vaders, Batmans, X-whatevers, witches, “ladies,” half-assed vampires in Dollarama fangs, zombies, and the inevitable ghost with ragged eyeholes.