The Monkeyface Chronicles (33 page)

Bob the PCA appears right away.

“Sir! Sir!” he barks. “Get off the patient! Now! He's too delicate for that!”

I feel the weight lift from my legs.

“Philip,” Bob says to me, “are you all right? How much pain do you feel?”

We have a system for this. One blink means some pain. Two means the pain is pretty bad. Three means it is excruciating. I blink four times.

He injects the tube, which is plugged into the main artery of my left arm, and a dose of cool morphine spreads through me.
Escape, sweet escape.

“I'm going to have to ask you to leave, sir,” Bob says.

“I'll do no such thing! This is my grandson. My son. My grandson. My son.”

“If you're not sure who he is,” Bob says coolly, “maybe you had better go think about it
outside the building.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“Oh, I think you will,” says Bob.

I can see their shadows on the wall. Bob seems at least as tall and a fair bit wider than the old mayor. But maybe it's just the morphine distorting my perception. Or maybe the man I knew as my grandfather was never as big as I thought he was.

As Bob escorts him out of the room, Vernon Skyler, my biological father, the man I will probably always still think of as my grandfather, shouts, “I will make things right again! I will do what needs to be done!”

Bob returns to the room a few minutes later. Or maybe it's a few hours. I may have passed out for a while.

“Feeling better now?” he asks. “Drugs doing their job?”

Yes, they are. My body feels like it is sublimating into vapour. The receding of the pain is as close as I will get to feeling pleasure today.

Bob gently rolls me over onto my right side, bends and pushes my left knee forward to keep me from rolling backward while I sleep. Every evening, to prevent the dreaded bed sores, he turns me to one side or the other, like meat roasting slowly on a grill. Last night, I simmered into sleep while observing the scenery outside my hospital room window: a parking lot with a couple of garbage dumpsters and a storey-tall propane cylinder. Tonight I'm facing the other direction, and my field of vision is dominated by the fake-wood beside table.

Between a package of sterile rubber gloves and a box of generic tissues, I see something glint. At first I think it's just another morphine hallucination, but I close my eyes and open them again, and I know what I am seeing is real.

There is the worn gold pocket watch, its chain clustered around it, its cover flipped open. I can just barely see the faint letter “S,” and I hear it faintly
tick tick tick
ing. Next to it is its companion jackknife, the small main blade folded out to reveal the words,
Stainless Steel.

According to my physiotherapist, Amiya, my brother Dennis visits me almost every night, long after visiting hours are over. He just sits at my bedside, holding his head, while I gurgle and hiss through my nightly sequence of morphine dreams and nightmares.

Other than that one visit from the old mayor, nobody else has come to see me, not my mother, nor the brother who posed as my father for so many years, nor any of my friends, not even Adeline. Her father's condo is only a few blocks from here; I wonder if she even knows what has happened to me. Dennis has been the only one.

Tonight is the first night I've succeeded in keeping myself awake this late. Dennis looks like he's aged a decade since the last time I saw him, filming himself having sex with a prostitute on the sofa in his apartment. His fancy business suit is frayed around the edges, and hangs loosely from his bony, slouching body. His hair is long and unkempt. His eyes, once wide with entrepreneurial vigor, have sunken into the dark pools of their sockets.

When he sees that my eyes are open, he forces a smile onto his downcast face, and says, “Hey, little bro. How ya feeling today?” He points down at the pad of writing paper on my lap, and says, “What's this? They have to re-teach you your letters?”

Today Amiya had me print the alphabet, over and over again, to help strengthen my grip, and maybe also to make sure that the blow to my head didn't make me forget about alphabetical order. My tight, neat cursive writing has degenerated into blunt, shaky block letters that would embarrass a six-year-old. The pencil is still gripped in my gnarled, cramped hand.

At the bottom of the page full of ABCs is the question I managed to write for Amiya: WHERE IS MY MOTHER?

She just looked away from me and said, “Oh, your mother is fine, Philip. Don't you worry about her right now. You just concentrate on getting better.”

I hope that Dennis will give me a straight answer. I tap my pencil on the pad: WHERE IS MY MOTHER?

“She'll come visit as soon as she can, Philip,” Dennis says, sighing, “but her hands are pretty full right now taking care of Michael. I promised her that I'd keep an eye on you in the meantime. I haven't always told the truth, but I've always kept my promises, haven't I?”

I know he's seeking absolution, I know I should write something on the notepad that tells him he's forgiven, but my pulse is pounding in every wound on my body. My accelerating breath is hissing through the tubes. I grip the pencil in my weak, swollen hand, and slowly scrawl out: MICHAEL?

“He's not in very good shape, Philip,” he says, sitting down beside my bed, rubbing his temples with his thumbs. “He's not really himself any more.”

Despite the pain it causes, I clench the pencil and scrawl on the pad: HE'S ALIVE?

“You mean you didn't know . . . you thought Michael was . . . didn't
Grandpa
tell you? He
did
come here to see you, didn't he?”

I'm not sure which question to answer.

“You know he's our
father
, right? I told him he'd better come here and tell you himself.
Did
he?”

YES

“Well, good,” Dennis says. “Can you believe him? I mean,
can
you? The son of a bitch dropped that bomb on me a couple of weeks ago at the hospital. Right beside Michael's bed!” He lowers his voice, imitating the old mayor's rumbling baritone,
‘Oh, by the way, Dennis, just in case you aren't already fucked up
enough, I just wanted to tell you that it's actually
me
who's your
father. Okay?'
I punched him right in the face.”

I know. I saw the bruises.

“So, sorry about all that step-brother crap, eh? Turns out we're actual brother-brothers. How about that — there's a little bit of you in me, and a little bit of me in you.”

I tap my pencil on the word YES, then over and over on the words

MICHAEL? HE'S ALIVE? MICHAEL? HE'S ALIVE?

“Yes, Philip. Michael is alive. He's still in hospital.”

Could this be the first time in my life that one of my prayers has been answered? Could there really be a God up there after all?

My dry eyes cannot make any tears, so I will not cry. I cannot jump up and down, nor can I hug my brother Dennis. I can't do anything.

“Hey,” Dennis says, “I'm kinda glad you're alive, too, y'know.”

They are the last words I hear before I pass out, but not from pain this time.

Pain and Gain

W
hile I lie in this hospital bed in Toronto, being fed and emptied through plastic tubes, my classmates at Plympwright District High School are receiving their graduation certificates and tossing their rented mortarboards in the air.

While I rise into a state of hazy, sedated semi-consciousness, and then fall back into the panic of morphine-induced nightmares, some of my peers go off in search of apprenticeships and jobs, while others leave Faireville for university, to build molecular models and study English literature and debate politics.

While I make monumental efforts to learn to hold a pencil and feed myself and move my legs again, the rest of them are making new friends, new futures, or just making love.

Sometimes, when the morphine and sedatives wear off, the pain is so extreme that I wonder if it would just be easier to give up and die. But then I remember one of Captain Quote's favourite lines from Winston Churchill:
‘When you're going
through Hell, keep going.'

So I keep going.

Dennis visits me almost every night. At first he brings books and reads them to me. When my hands are working again, he plays tic-tac-toe with me, to help my fine motor skills improve. Dennis is acting like a real brother now.

So I keep going.

One night Dennis arrives with Adeline Brown. She's lost those ten pounds, and looks more than ever like the billboard model she so wants to be, except that she's got breasts and hips. “I can't stay long,” she says, “I've got an appointment with my personal trainer in an hour.” She rubs her thin, muscled, goosebump-speckled arms. “Institutional buildings give me the creeps. Always too cold. Too bare. Too sparse.” I suppose I understand why she feels that way.

Her father bought her a session with a fashion photographer for her birthday, and she leaves a picture of her nearly perfected self on my bedside table, so I can see her and think of her even when she's not here.

So I keep going.

I spend my eighteenth birthday in an induced coma while Dr. Chin and his team perform elaborate surgeries to reconstruct my nose and jaw and teeth. I have no idea if it snows on my birthday. It probably doesn't matter. My mother is here during the entire procedure. I am vaguely aware of her sitting beside my bed afterward, her long hair brushing my face. My mother is here, at least for the moment, and she still loves me.

So I keep going.

Dennis arrives on another night with two guests. The first is my older brother Landon, who I spent most of my life believing was my father. It's the first time that Dennis, Landon and I have been in the same room together with all of us knowing the truth. I don't feel angry or resentful or hurt about it anymore; after spending so much time in a hospital room, with only my thoughts to keep me busy, many injustices have been reconciled, much has been forgiven.

So I keep going.

Landon introduces me to his boyfriend Arty, with whom he is now living in Toronto. They've got a condo near Church and Wellesley. Arty is the same man who went into the windowless basement room with Landon on the night that Dennis and I fired up the Jacob's Ladder. He wasn't a “scientific colleague” at all, of course; he had been buying Landon's paintings to sell at
The Arty Gallery
, his gallery on Front Street.

“Lanny's becoming a pretty good cook,” Arty says, running his palm down Landon's back. Perhaps this means that Landon has abandoned his “scientifically balanced” midday meal of half a roast beef and tomato sandwich, half a peanut butter and banana, a sliced apple, three broccoli florets, and a tumbler of two percent milk.

I want to ask him about this, but it's way too much for me to scrawl onto the notepad, so instead I print: R U HAPPY LANDON?

He says that he is.

So I keep going.

There are more operations: skin grafts, dental surgeries, little cosmetic adjustments to the artificial bone structure from the bridge of my nose to the tip of my chin. Every time they lift me onto that gurney and wheel me into the operating theatre, I wonder if something might go wrong that will end my life. I am acutely aware of how quickly, and with how little warning, things can go wrong. One moment, Michael was celebrating a goal scored. The next moment, he was lying on the ice with a broken neck and back, with blood pouring from his head.

But he is alive.

My twin brother is alive.

So I keep going.

Amiya leads me through my workout for the day. She has tied long, thick elastic bands to the rails of my bed, and I work the muscles in my arms and legs by stretching them in different directions.

“Pull, pull, pull, rest,” Amiya sings out. I believe that her voice has healing powers. “Pull, pull, pull, rest.”