The Journey Prize Stories 24 (25 page)

Avoiding the mess fucked with my hours, because it took a solid two and a half off of them, but I don’t say anything. Instead I put my hand in a locker and slammed the door a few times. I knew at the time that it wasn’t productive but it made a kind of sense. It was about my hours, but for those poor girls, too, like if I felt bad pain it could somehow straighten things out for them
and
me.

When I look back I know I’m acting this way because I refused to take the pills they said I needed after my hospital stay. I thought refusing them would make me stronger, that if I could get through on my own, it would be for the better. And so in that state, thinking about what the bricks and the kids and the wall meant kind of made me decide things I shouldn’t have. Like that the building was alive. That it did stuff to people, and did stuff on its own.

It gave me something to do for the rest of my nights, on my smoke breaks, in the toilet bowls. Gave me something to look for when I was doing the floors, gave me cracks to see in the ceiling and little differences to notice. I was sure the school was moving. Maybe it was all marshland underneath or a slow sinkhole or something, but there were signs of growing and shrinking, no doubt about it. The more I thought about it, the more I remembered stuff that had been one way and was now another, like a whole door that used to be under the stairwell, and the giant mirror that was right next to the south double doors that was just gone.

“What happened to that stuff?” I would ask out loud. I wanted to ask Charles but then I wasn’t really sure if he was on our side or
Edmund Burke
’s. I wanted to go look for the girl in the silver shirt from all those weeks ago, but I was both scared
I wouldn’t be able to find her and that I would, that I’d lose my job up there on a hot, sticky night.

I mostly didn’t think about the building during my daytime. I’d just watch TV and smoke and take walks, but more than a few times I catch the tail end of an idea of a memory I’d once had that could help with my theory. Memories are hard to hold onto without booze, and I even thought about buying some Russian Prince just so I could make my brain work right – not even to get drunk, just a few ounces to grease the wheels and get things going.

I didn’t give in, though, not then. I’d get into bed and sleep when I felt like that, and eventually my missing memory came to me. Spider-Man dealt with this shit once. A living building. It was a museum and it tried to kill him. And a green guy was in it. Like a mummy or a zombie, all rotten and shit, and he controlled the museum. He made chandeliers fly around and wax cavemen chase Spider-Man around. In the end, a suit of armour cut Spider-Man’s head off. Or no – Spider-Man cut the green guy’s head off. But it grew back.

I tried to explain it to the guy at the comic shop and he said he wasn’t sure which issues I meant. He said it sounded more like a
Twilight Zone
episode but I said no, it’s definitely a comic. I read it as a kid, and then again at the library in the can back in ’01. It was a pretty dull day so him and me went digging through the oldies and I realized it wasn’t a zombie, it was Spider-Man’s enemy, the Lizard. We found four Spider-Man comics with museums in them, but only one of them had the lizard. It wasn’t the right comic, but it was close enough that I bought it. Read it at the McDonald’s nearby and even though it wasn’t the one I remember, it seemed so familiar that it made
me feel better, even if it didn’t tell me how to solve my problem.

I lost the comic book before I could read it twice, but I saw the Lizard guy the next night in a dream. He was standing in the hall at the school, upstairs near the toilets, and he had a mean hard-on sticking out of his pants and lab coat. Was hissing and laughing and playing with himself, trying to keep it going so he could give it to me. He didn’t look real – looked like a guy in a costume but I got the idea that maybe the costume was alive, growing on the guy like moss.

“Don’t come forward,” I said, but of course he did.

As he came at me, I got a jolt of pain in my guts like I’d been knifed and I fell backwards over my mop bucket, tipped the thing over, and within seconds I was soaked in brown water.

The green guy’s rubber feet squeaked after me and it was then that I realized I wasn’t dreaming, I was just seeing shit. I heard the echo of my own voice spiralling down the halls and bouncing off the floors and then it was quiet. Then I saw just how dark it was outside. That it was just another night and the hall was empty. The doctor warned me I was probably gonna see shit. He said I’d feel good for a bit and then it would be like detox all over again. And it would be bad. I thought it had come and gone but there it was after all. It doesn’t take long to realize I’m going to need those pills he talked about.

I barely finished my cleaning that night because I was so fucked up over the Lizard. I kept looking over my shoulder and even fell down the stairs because of it. Ended up scraping my hands and bashing my knees and it took everything, everything in me not to walk to Ron’s or whatever bar would let me in at eight a.m. to drink my face off.

—

It hurt to go to the doctor. To say that I fucked up and I couldn’t straighten myself out on my own, but he was nice about it. He said what he said before, that it’s not an option to go without the pills. That a guy as young as me can still make it if we get on top of it. He prescribed the stuff, which is usually for old people, but said it would help me keep my head straight. He also gave me a chart of stuff to eat, vitamins to take. Said that people who have alcohol dementia need nutrition more than anything else. It’s important to eat three meals, make them healthy, and never miss them.

I realized too, that I hadn’t been drinking enough water, just a few cups of coffee and a can of coke to stay up. The doctor straightens all that up though, and after a while, I actually feel good. I start getting that high all the time and for a while the job gets better. With something as easy as the right food the right amount of times, the right pill at the right hour, things make more sense. Three weeks is all it takes for me to feel like a teenager again. At night, the school is quiet, like a church, and when I clean it, it’s like a whole new place to me. It’s like I’ve just come back from another planet – one that looked just like this one, except without straight lines and right angles. I stop seeing shit, hearing shit, thinking insane thoughts, and more than once I have a hard time remembering what it was even like before the pills.

It stays away from me, and I don’t even think about the building growing or moving, or controlling people’s minds. I just about forget all about it until I find that comic book in a bag with a bunch of porno magazines and mouldy burger wrappers. I laugh out loud, and remember how crazy I was being, like it’s so far away from where I am now. But then, I
look inside, look a little
too
close at one of the pages and that Lizard is smiling too hard, his mouth
too
wide. And I feel it, like it’s all fresh. I close the book. Throw it out.

One night the professors get me in their office. I’m going by with the dust mop and one of them shouts,
Hey
, and I stop. I don’t know why I stop. One of them has a sixty-ouncer, drinking right out of the neck with one hand like the kids would do, except it’s a fancy Scotch I’ve never heard of. I get the sense from looking at them that maybe something had gone wrong for one of them, and maybe the other was the kind of person who’d go along with anything. Then he passes the bottle around the room a few times, and when it gets to me I watch my hand bring it to my mouth. Feel my mouth open, my throat take it and send it down to my belly, and feel everything get dull. Even though I stand there and joke with them and listen to their shit, it takes everything to keep it together. I feel like I’m falling backwards into something like a bed, but warmer. Something like water, but softer. I realize that I believe the building is moving again. I believed it with my first sip. And more, I’ve always believed it.

I want to say something like,
No sorry, I don’t drink
, say it now and launch it back ten minutes ago, but I can’t. I realize that going to meetings and all that probably would have trained me to say it. I would have said it when I met them, would have shaken their hands and told them about my disorder or disease or whatever you call it.

Then we’re outside, and I’m on my hands and knees, showing them the slope in the ground made by the building as it moves forward.

“That’s amazing,” one of them says.

“This place is fucking haunted to shit anyway,” the one with the beard says. “All I hear is people saying they wish the department was somewhere else. Jane saw a ghost here once.”

“Fuck Jane,” the other one says, then the bottle goes around again and we’re leaving to get more and I don’t even think about my mop and bucket, up on the third floor. Don’t think about the unlocked maintenance room, the extension cord running down an entire hallway into a stairwell. The six dirty washrooms that need to be cleaned.

We’re at a bar after that, and they got us each a pitcher and we’re in a place that doesn’t even care if we drink right out of the jug. Then I realize we’re at Ron’s, and I brought us here. Nick’s behind the bar, watching me, and I get the sense that maybe I’m dreaming, maybe I’ve floated here in a dream and really I’m in bed, groaning and rolling around and kicking the shit out of the sheets. Maybe I’m still good, and I haven’t drunk a drop and everything’s okay.

“I need to put together a resume,” I tell the professors. “I need to get a new job.”

“Take out an ad,” the younger one says. “I’m sure you can do a lot of jobs.”

“I’m alive,” I tell them. “Got two legs.”

“Is alive and can move,” the other one says, moving his hands like he’s creating a headline before our eyes.

There’s a long black piece in my memory like a blindfold and then I’m on a beach with my shirt off.

“Look at that,” one of the girls says. There are girls.

We look out across the harbour at the city and even though it’s late, the lights and the fog and the sky all around it are this deep purple, green at the edges like a bruise. There are clouds
overtop of it that aren’t over us, and you can see the little flashes of lightning way in the air as things get ready to open up.

“The school’s moving,” I tell the professors. “In the past two months, it’s moved two feet. That’s why the wall collapsed.”

“Of course it is,” one of them says. “According to my research, the whole city’s on the move. It wants to get into the Atlantic.”

“Really?”

“It’s a living thing, the city. I know that sounds like a joke, but it grows and changes and learns. Does stuff. Just like us. Except it runs on people.”

“That’s bullshit,” I say, but I can feel myself getting scared. “Gonna need a new job.”

“He’s a professor,” one of the girls says in a voice I don’t like. Everyone looks at me like they’re serious, though. Like I’m not being fucked with.

“Your body runs on a bunch of smaller things going around and doing stuff. Your blood, your cells, antibodies, bacteria, all that stuff. A city’s the same thing, except we’re those little guys making it work, keeping it alive. You see?”

“Yeah,” I tell them. And I do. I can actually see it in my mind, all of us climbing over scaffolding and driving our cars and walking up and down the streets like water through a pipe. I want to ask them if they know somewhere I can get a job, but then someone passes me a drink and I realize I don’t know anyone’s name, don’t even know who or what they are.

“The city’s gonna dump us all into the ocean,” the bitchy girl says. “You think two feet is impressive? Try a kilometre a year. That’s how fast the city is trying to kill us.”

“It’s true,” the professor says, but this time I can hear something in his voice. Then his friend speaks up and I realize
they’ve been bullshitting me, going around in circles making shit up.

Smoke pours out of the other professor’s bearded mouth as thick as taffy, and he says, “Oh yeah, the world’s coming to an end. This is fucking it.”

Then there was thunder, and that feeling you get inside, that rumble that wants you to run away like an animal on a nature documentary, and I could almost see it. I could see that bruise colour spreading through the sky, and then I saw it. Everything shook and I felt it right in the middle of me and the city actually
moved
, moved a whole block over. Like
kachunk
, and there it was, settling in, nestling into place like a cat. And the thunder got louder and louder and the sky lit up again and when it was over, when the noise from the sky got quiet, almost everyone was laughing like crazy. I could feel something coming, something coming right up from inside of me, so I make a point to try and drift off to that place where everything gets dark and I can sink into myself like a stone down to the bottom of my thoughts. Then something bad happens.

Three years later I go back to that school and eyeball from the corner of the steps to the tree, and count out the paces and put my hands flat on the earth and I swear it’s taking a
goddamned
walk up the city. I’m completely dry, and I’m on my medicine, and I’ve been stone-cold sober since I was back on the street but I swear it’s moved. It’s a cold fall day and I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s all there. And I can still see that same dark shit in all the kids that look at me like I’m some kind of monster dragging my belly in the dirt, but it’s actually the other way around and they’ll never know it.

“E
l, are you there? Elliot?
Pick up the goddamn phone
.” I slide my left cheek along the frosted window, place one of my palms against the white glass so it leaves a kind of caveman handprint, a brief, skeletal X-ray in melted relief. I don’t really care to answer. Her voice on the machine is panicky, needy and messed up in its despair. It’s early in December. Snowing outside. I used to sit like this for hours as a kid, tracing icy snowflakes, watching the weird light change as it poured into cold rooms, through all those intricate patterns and crazy designs.