The Adjustment League (31 page)

No cops. Think.

The help Stone often gives in closing windows. Hints. Prompts. Cajolings. Coming faster as his time approaches. Hardly from a spirit of altruism. He wants me finished with my work, done with the adjustment, no hanging threads, when he takes receipt of me. A clean slate for him to scrawl things on. With every unobstructed minute of the shift he's got coming to him.

Spoiled, of course. Spoiled rotten. What in his life has prepared him to believe he could run out of options? That there's no safe tab to click. No card to swipe, insert, or tap.

So he clings to the hope that I haven't sent the pics. Or not the worst of them. Since the cops aren't saying yet. Tells himself I wouldn't give up my leverage without getting something in return.

Or?

Or?

Think.

Handing out Hallowe'en candy a strangely good way to do just that. Sitting behind a mask as another mask comes up the stairs and mutters Trick or Treat, or stands there saying nothing at all. And you fish absently for some goodies and drop them in the bag.

Or… he doesn't put me at his father's house because it wasn't him who sent me there. Wasn't him who saw, coolly and without passion, that things had got to that point.

Which point?

The point at which you jump a sinking ship.

One home, Grade Eight or so, had these two little brainiacs down the street, twins, their parents both theoretical something-or-others, and the mother used to call out the door as they trundled off with their lunch bags: Remember, think! Warbled it after them in a high, posh voice.

For a couple of top-grade browners—nerds not yet the default word—they got picked on surprisingly little. They had a knowingness about them, an irony about their special status—yes, they'd been cast as angels in this particular play, but in the next act they might be dolts—that seemed to take the air out of bullies. Apart from the usual hissed remarks, some trippings and shovings, they got off pretty lightly, even in gym.

Remember. Think.

Lucius comes down just after 12:00 to make sure change-over is going smoothly. It is. The cruisers have finally shoved off and the new team is working in quick-time, using a fireman's chain up to the elevator, an operator to shoot loads up and down, and a chain on the top floor down the hall and into the apartment. They've had all night to plan it.

I've moved inside to keep out of their way, which is where Lucius finds me. I was just about to come up and return the chair.

“Is okay. I'll take it up.”

“Sorry about the noise, Lucius. 305 might be up all night, cleaning and unpacking.”

He smiles. “Is okay. Last day of school week tomorrow.”

And his own busiest day—lawns needing sprucing before the weekend dinner parties—but his sleep doesn't matter, only Jared's.

“Your car. I notice is gone all day. You take it in somewhere?”

“It stopped. I left it on the street.”

“Just left?” Frowning, like his son. “Police gonna take it then. Impound. Probably they do already. And is expensive to get back. Parking fine. Towing. And something else—”

“It's okay, Lucius. I've been walking everywhere lately. I think I'll just keep doing that.”

“Just walk?”

“Yeah. Take the TTC if it's too far.”

I realize I'm still wearing the mask. You get used to it, despite the heat. But as soon as I take it off, cool air surrounds my head, even in the hallway. A sour chemical stink comes off the sweaty latex.

“Why you keep looking down the stairs? Is midnight. Is all done, right?”

“It is, you're right. Just don't want to miss anyone, I guess.”

“Your chest.” Lucius points at it. “Those guys again?”

I look down at myself. Blotches in places, dark burgundy on the light gray T-shirt. Some bandages on the checkerboard must have soaked through.

“No. Another guy. But it's minor, nothing to worry about. Get some sleep. I'll come up in a while to make sure 305 are keeping it down.”

He nods, stands there a few more seconds before leaving. He's back to looking at me again, but with worry lines almost as fixed as his son's.

§

I stand in the living room a long while, like someone trying to remember or decide something important. Then go through the door onto the balcony. The tower blinking orange and blue—
no such thing as black lights.
All Saints' Day. The devils have had their due and now it's the turn of purified souls. Hands on the cold railing, I cock my head and breathe slowly and deeply through my nose—as if I might hear some faint blessed rustling, the glidings of super-goodness, or catch the sweet elusive scent of incorruptible will.

But nothing—nothing new—comes to ear or nostril.

I think the devils are just sleeping it off. A Venti Bold is all it will take to put them right back in the fray.

From halfway down the hall, I hear 305's move-in clamour. Thud and slide of heavy boxes, shouts to each other about where to put things, water running, hammer bangs even. They'd howl to all the gods—they
will
—when their neighbours pull something like it. And yet I find it hard to get angry with these two. They seem too innocent, too unformed. Being their super will be like being their teacher. Like training an autistic élite to recognize and respond to others, to come a step closer to actually sharing the world with them.

I knock gently.

“Some of this
can't
wait till tomorrow. We wouldn't be doing
any
of it now if you'd given us a clean apartment instead of a pigsty.”

“When was I supposed to clean it—between midnight and a minute past? I told you to wait till tomorrow. Till later today.”

“Well, we didn't know those clowns would be using a stopwatch. I hope you kept their damage deposit at least.”

“Show me the damage.”

They do, the darlings.

“That's sweep-up stuff. Bag and drag. Some vacuuming—in the
morning
. Or Comet and a rag. If you want, I'll show you what damage looks like sometime.”

“Thanks. I think we're seeing plenty.”

Walking away, I feel light and clear when I shouldn't feel either, and I ask myself when I last really slept. A nap on the mattress after the cleanup Tuesday is all I remember. Closing my eyes and maybe drifting off a few minutes. Just that until Doc Wyvern's drug-daze.

Two and a half days ago. Catnaps in the days before that
.

I feel the drag I should, the anchor pulling me down. The spots, dark grains, in front of my eyes. Like a black veil, swirling. Everything on fire, the air alive with soot.

And yet I'm bubbling still. Ready to set up 305's kitchen for them. Eager with it.

It's why a window closes. To put a stop to these absurdities. To end the contradictions.

Substantial and profound 19 October

A drive down Unionville streets, admiring the houses as she loves to do—“These houses are… substantial”—amazed at the word, at the sound of it in her mouth. “Yes, they are, that's exactly the word.” I made a bit too much of my delight. Then, walking around Vivera, we came to a tree with very dark red leaves, an almost black burgundy, which she reached for, saying, “This colour is… profound.”
Profound
. I wanted to weep, without knowing exactly what I would be weeping for.

If we met in an afterlife—which I don't believe in—what could she tell the absent ones of these years they've missed? (Say death reforms them, say they grow an appetite for others' news.) A handful of disjointed, contradictory phrases, scenes that change with every telling. They would be hungry for how it was with her, but she couldn't give them that. She has moments, some good—but not news. Not a story made of stories.

She turned to me yesterday. “Something so… wrong with my mind. I think I must be dying.” And then, when I didn't say anything: “I should talk to a doctor. Is there anything they can do for me? Do you think?” She was looking right at me, her eyes wide and guileless. “I think everything that can be done is being done,” I had to tell her.

A new idea comes to me. I feel excited thinking about it.
She wants visible damage
.
Like it is with her
, and smack my head with the obviousness of it. Why the checkerboard was no good. Bloody and determined, sure—but who's seeing it under your shirt?

Snapping off the X-Acto blade to get a fresh segment, I begin scoring lines in a ring around my eye. Like a sun's rays, up into forehead, down into cheek, out into temple and across the nose. It's important to apply a steady pressure to each line until it starts to coagulate, especially the upper rays, otherwise I'm blind from the trickling and can't continue.

Excited,
really on to something
, but I force myself to keep a steady hand and go slow.

Afterwards, sitting expectantly among the
far cors
, I know a disappointment so profound that it would bring me to weeping if I wasn't already so far below that.

I'd settled myself with such expectancy, my knees drawn up and trembling. Tried it with eyes open, closed—tried it both ways, not knowing which would work best. Which would delve me faster through the dark.

But no stairs came, and No One waiting on them.

A timeless, thoughtless daze. And then quickly, numbly, as if I'm exiting a room like any other, I leave that place and re-enter Big Empty and resume reading to be doing something, riffling back to near the end.

§

Black letters in a cone of light
. How special they appeared, how different. Words you knew by heart, knew to clogging boredom, when you encountered them on a page by simple daylight, under soft lamplight. Now transposed to so much more, sometimes something altogether unconnected, trapped and transfigured in this zone, seared by this selective shining.

Move the source even slightly and the black all around responds like a living thing, lets fall pieces of itself into the radiant charged circle, squiggles that squirm and oscillate before finding their new, proper shapes.

Old, old memory. It comes from far away.

Fabrics, rough and smooth, above me. Touching my head, grazing my neck and back. A tent of bedclothes? Forbidden reading at night?

No. Nothing touching my legs. A hardness under me. But my left hand, reaching up, ripples cool uneven textures.

I pause a long moment, flashlight and book in hand, before entering. Not sure how she'll feel about it,
I've never carried anything in but myself
.

But it feels permissible. More, it feels right. Not reading yet, but she loved hearing stories. And talked non-stop, babbling like a tiny old drunk.

And fire slicing dark. Pouring pure white
far
upon the black squiggles.

That
she would love.

It's the final entry I'll try. Sandor's non-conclusion, non-epilogue. Non-anything but end.

Undated

Some things can only be reported. In the four months since I agreed to lock her into the Memory Gardens, she has grown increasingly combative. Insults and threats to other residents. To staff. The reports reach me by phone, by monthly checklist with Comments box.

J visits now, according to Jade. Has all her life equipped her for this? Prepared her to be the one who accompanies her on this final, darkest leg, when no one else can?

Yesterday she had another old woman down on the floor, slapping her in the face and head. Was taken to ER for tests and observation. Results negative, as expected. Around 4 a.m. they phoned to advise me that they had given her Haldol and she was being returned by patient transport.

All the reasons she has had over eighty-two years to beat on someone—for whatever they did, whatever she knew. And yet she served dutifully. Only to now assault a sweet and balding old woman, as frail and lost as herself.

Ah, Sandor
. Omissions are your signature, the secret of your mystery. You trail off sprinkling them like bread crumbs. Let the reader follow if he will. If he reaches the hut in the forest, you won't be home. Critical reflection all through on your care of her, hard questions put to yourself—only to clam up at the starkest juncture:
In the four months since I agreed to lock her into…
Judy visits now because forty-five years of wandering wards and alleys have “equipped” her for it? Maude's demented battery now an echo too late of real punishment due. …
for whatever they did, whatever she knew.
Casually mentioned, never followed up. Why allude to what you won't explain? In a purely private journal, yes…

Writing: a wily weakness. Seducer, pander, dodger—will-o'-the-wisp. Confess on a cross to duck the resurrection entirely. To do your bit, to be seen doing it, to have done with it…

I'll meet you, Sandor. We're not done yet.

And on the day goes, endless and instantaneous.

Through cuttings, re-readings, cuttings. Aimless drifting spells. Vigils among the
far cors
.

Fire trucks go out sometimes, not as many as usual and not for long. They come back soon, the helmeted men looking bored as they halt traffic while the driver backs in. The angels must be keeping ashtrays closer, elements more distant.

The honking from below swells to a minor frenzy and levels off.

And then I see a tall man standing in the window looking back at me, and know it's night.

19

…something you forgot…
something you've forgotten…

All night long, in whispers, instead of sleep.

Saturday morning, early. Sitting in the armchair by the window, the streetlights still on. Back it comes. Two weeks ago, sweeping up the night's trash in the lobby. Paper peeping from the mailbox. An address and three letters. TAL.

An acronym, an old joke.
A thread dropped. An itch you forgot to scratch
.

From Judy
, you told yourself, before you forgot to ask. But when did Judy ever leave a message someone else could understand? From a location they could reach? And how, and when? Judy in bed beside her dead and cooling mother.

You chase through an adjustment to find out how it starts
.

A mother's voice, decades ago. Grateful, confiding. Speaking to the window mesh so your face won't make her lie.
All girls sob, hug stuffed animals. It's that darn Scribbler I worry about. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Who knows what comes out of that?

But you don't say. Still a long way, most days, from speaking.

Memories: addresses from the future. Smells from rooms you'll live in, to help you settle in.

Strange reversal, sorcery of a process unwinding. My head getting clearer, drop by drop, like a bone in Jared's dungeon, when it's got no business doing anything but raving or sleeping.

Dark lightens, more gray seeping in. Fire door an ember filmed by ash. Whispering why the adjustment that should be over, isn't. Why the window so ready to close—can't quite bang shut.

Still some people to see. One, two. Two at least.

Clarity. It comes sometimes as a window closes. Like a circle that needs to find its start to seal itself. To be complete so it can end.

Comes from
how
a window closes. Not by sliding down, across—not that kind of window. By fogging over, and then the fog goes dark. But rub a patch of the fog, you might catch a detail skipped past when you were busy scoping a larger scene. Scanning to find an adjustment which soon swept you away, until its closing almost-end, when you glimpse the thing skipped past again, and know.

Know who wound you up and sent you ticking after Wyverns. Know where they live.

Even have a glimmer of why.

§

Shoppers not open for another hour, 9:00 on Saturdays. I buy the
Star
at the Convenience on the corner. A place I usually avoid, for the surly eyeballings the Asian owner gives the Face. A mixture of truculence and suspicion, as if he wants to give it a preemptive whack. Which makes me want to give him one. Which is just too many mental beatings for a paper or a litre of milk.

But he opens early. Closes late. Sleeps who knows when, if at all. Maybe we're just too much alike.

Walking up the street, I scan a front page that's all-Wyvern. For the time being, the Big Man and his Brother are banished to Local, strictly small-time sleaze. They'll have to ramp up their act past crack, lies, and denigration if they want back in the limelight.

The dead man's photo still central, as befits a murdered king. But around him have sprouted pictures of Judy, Max, Vivian—
daughter
,
son
,
foster-daughter
. As if the family is growing in death, giving birth to itself in posthumous scandal.

There's no mother for the brood—no photo of Maude, thankfully. Nor one of Sandor, yet. Just a quote near his name, asking the media for “privacy during a difficult time… dealing with difficult issues.” Instead of a mother, there are broken white lines, interrupted by white question marks, connecting the dead ruler with his offspring and foster-offspring. The white lines, nicely stark on black, remind me of Creation graphics in mythology books. All of these children springing from the head of Zeus, with roles and relations yet to be defined. Happily, the
Star
has included wavy lines to blank white boxes with black question marks inside them—their graphics department has obviously had a blast with this—to signify suspected but still-to-be-identified peers and partners. These are the boxes I hope to see proliferate and fill in.

It's the nest I've envisioned all along. A hive with secret chambers and cells, various humid tunnels connecting them.

The headlines evoke the same excitement and uncertainty.
TRAGIC PLOT THICKENS
.
Sex Crimes Investigation Joins Murder Inquiry
.
A Family's Woes Multiply
. Sadness and intrigue vying for precedence—with disgust pacing in the wings, awaiting its cue.

“Alleged” and “allegedly” sprinkled throughout, fairy dust to keep the lawyers happy and let the readers know it's all true.

Judy, picked up early yesterday while I was cutting myself and reading by flashlight, hasn't yet been formally charged. Like Max and Vivian, she's being “held for questioning… no further comment at this time.” It was just wishful thinking to hope she'd ghost past the police. Apparitions are their business, after all.

And I don't seem to be their business whatsoever. No uniforms in sight. No spinning lights on cars. Not even a green light blinking on my phone.

Max not fingering me? Vivian not fingering me? And Judy not—well, only Judy's no surprise. Assuming she thought of me at all, they'd have as much luck getting a statue of Kali to come clean. I saw her on the ward. The shrinks, nurses, social workers, occupational therapists—all the professional talk-jocks that took cracks at us… when it came to Judy, they looked like big flies trapped in a room, batting themselves against a tiny pane of glass.

Along with puzzled relief, I feel a twinge of disappointment. Part of me was ready to head back to the small room and wire-mesh window. Head home, set up camp, and take stock from there.

They've got one nut. One nut coming home.
Maybe that's all they need.

Sitting on the steps of Shoppers, I spread the paper open to follow the stories to the inside pages, forcing the line-up to swerve grumbling around me. But my eyes focus poorly through the swirling grains, I can't take in more than isolated words and phrases. It's just too late in the window. Or past it, more like: window overtime.

I flip to Births and Deaths, where side-by-side photos of Max and Maude—in smiling middle age, on vacation maybe—warn me to expect an incongruous obituary, with no connection to their obliterated family on Page One.

Near the end of
A Family's Woes Multiply
, a fragment pops out at me, Maude's name in a wistful windup: “…perhaps a blessing that she died too soon to know…”

Which is a question—how deep the hell of her marriage?—for despair and kindly oblivion to debate to an eternal standoff. Though the driver of a car on Bloor, slamming to a stop at a sickening thump, will always give the nod to despair.

The doors unlock, the line shoves in, a voice says, “Next time find a Starbucks for that.”

I look up into the stupid eyes and immaculate coats of two large black poodles, chained to the wheelchair ramp railing. Their thighs and groins and rumps have been shaved, accentuating their calf muffs and fluffy erect tails and the curly matted hair covering their backs and faces. They stand alert, blocking the ramp entirely. I return their spoiled black stares, wishing an obese paraplegic with a power cart would flatten them.

When that doesn't happen, I take their meaning and move on.

§

Lynette's kitchen is cosy, light-filled. Varnished pine-slat table in a glassed-in eating nook, cushioned banquettes on three sides around it. Trays of herbs and flowers inside the windows, a more ambitious rock garden in the small backyard. High, narrow bookcases built into brick walls, dividing the nook's airy spareness from the cluttered kitchen where she's fixing our teas.

This is the other side of Forest Hill, the side I tend to forget exists. The Good Life, gracious and tranquil. It may be only the more discreet and thoughtful sibling of Fuck-You-I-Got-Mine—but discretion and thoughtfulness count. Especially when, apart from miscellaneous outposts like No Name, they seem to be the only two residency options available.

Watching her pick loose leaf from a jar, fill the kettle, get down mugs from hooks—I have the strange sense I've lived here a long time. It's nothing like anywhere I've actually lived, and bears no relation to my present state of mind or circumstances. Yet the illusion persists even when I close my eyes to dispel it. Is joined, in fact, by an equally disconcerting, equally pleasant feeling of heaviness all through my body—as if I could actually fall asleep, if I let myself.

Milk? Cream? Some honey?
I hear faintly, like wavelets lapping deep inside myself.

So much to say, we don't say anything for a while. Just sit and sip our teas, a little too regularly, on either side of the pine table, uncertain where to begin. “You look good,” I say finally, repeating what I said at her door.

She colours a little, murmurs, “Well…” She can hardly repeat her own first words: “Oh, dear.” Which popped out of her when she saw my eye, the fresh cuts rayed around it, but seemed to mean more than that or than the Face in general or the beat-up body attached to it. Maybe just the fact of these physical things she'd passed so often finally being on her front step, ringing her doorbell. Though she had to have been expecting that, sooner or later.

Her eyes, now that they've broken out of the Infinite Tunnel to meet mine, are hazel. And familiar. They're a deeper green-gold now, and seem bigger in her thinner face, but they're the eyes I remember from the ward. In almost every other way, she's changed. Slim and self-contained, deft in her movements; not farmgirl-plump and clumsy, hugging her flannel-nightgowned body, knocking things over. Chic blonde bob; not wheat-brown braids she did herself and sucked or chewed when upset. Strong cheekbones, chin, a speedwalker's spring and slimness. Her breasts smaller but sitting higher—they sagged back then. Anyone looking at her would see miraculous transformation, all for the better. A metamorphosis from lumpish depression to mature beauty. So why on earth do I feel something has been lost?

Twenty years ago, Judy and I were nearing forty, confirmed in our insanities. Lynette was twenty-three? twenty-four?—on the cusp, basically unformed, in a bad way but still capable of becoming anything, including something very different from what she'd been up till then.
Are you regretting she had to become anything definite at all?

She raises her hands and holds them flat above the table, as if to rescue me from my dilemma or to confirm her identity. They shake. A fine constant tremor, not so far from Judy's.

“Still?”

“There's no Botox for bad nerves. No surgery either.”

“I'm surprised you didn't find me sooner. I thought TAL would be a dead giveaway. I mean, how many people could it be, right? And back then, I don't know, I guess I thought of you as someone with special powers, sort of.” She says it around her mug, blushing a bit. “I needed to think there could be someone like that, especially there. You were older too. I might've had a bit of a crush. Back then. And when I started seeing you around the neighbourhood, and hearing some stories—it came back a bit, I think. I mean that sense that you were someone who knew things other people didn't—almost that you could see through walls. It sounds so silly to say. Little Lynette. But I've been afraid for two weeks you'd knock on my door, walking around on pins and needles. It's a relief you're here finally. Really.”

“Why afraid? You left the note.”

“I did. But I was desperate. When you got the idea to give that awful nurse all those pills, did you have any idea what they might do to him?”

“Not a clue. None of us did.”

“True. But we were basically just following your lead. You sounded so sure of things. And like I say, you've got kind of a reputation now, whether you know it or not. People tell stories. You may not hear them.”

“You know about Brad?”

“Yes, I heard it from someone. Very sad.”

I sip my tea, trying to piece it out. Just two weeks ago, but it might as well be two years, and it's hard to get back to anywhere near the beginning of the adjustment, see where I might have dropped the thread. Even to remember what happened, in the order it happened. What I was thinking, or might have been.

“You're right,” I say after a bit. “It should've been obvious. You gave me all I needed. But I got distracted. These Wyverns…” She nods, but that blush comes into her cheek again, a teenage tell she hasn't lost. “I told myself it had to be Judy.”

“Judy!”

“I know. Leaving a note I could understand? With an address I could get to?”

“Besides, Judy was up with her mom. All night that night.” She plays with her spoon in the mug. “I'm saying too much probably. But you know I know Sandor. You've seen us in the writing group. And maybe you know I published his book. He told me he signed your copy.”

I let the part about Sandor go for now. It's coming back to me, my thinking that first day. Blurry but I can make it out, like pieces of a wreck I'm seeing underwater. “It was a choice between you and Judy, in my mind. But—” Trying to get it straight for myself. “Judy and I are lifers. Different kinds, but lifers. That adjustment wasn't my first—I realized that on the ward—and later, over time, adjustments became a pattern. And Judy has adjustments too, her own kind. By whatever rules go on in her head. You? I thought of you as passing through the ward, Lynette. I assumed—I hoped—you'd moved on, like from a bad dream. So I didn't think you'd remember it.”

“TAL? You don't forget the things that kept you alive.”

“Did it really?”

“
Did it? Am I talking a bunch of shit?
” She tilts her head and asks it in a different voice. Like a drill, a reality check, she's learned, or been taught, to put herself through. “Yes. Yes, it did. For five hundred and forty days.”