Things Go Flying (9 page)

S
upper that night was more animated than usual.

Often, Harold found family meals a bit of a strain. Audrey viewed family meals as a time to instill values, teach proper table manners, and enjoy civilized conversation. They all felt the pressure. As a result, the atmosphere was frequently tense, and the conversation stilted. The boys naturally wanted to talk with their mouths full, interrupt each other and trade mild insults, but Audrey wouldn't allow it. It usually ended up with nobody saying much of anything. The sound of everybody chewing, Audrey's questions about school, and the boys' monosyllabic answers, made Harold miserable.

But the night of the identity theft was different. Harold ordered pizza, because Audrey was still too woozy from fainting to cook. Pizza they were allowed to eat with their hands. Also, Audrey was still in shock about the mortgage and wasn't enforcing the rules as closely as usual. The boys were full of questions, which they mostly asked with their mouths full.

“What's going to happen?” John asked anxiously, looping a piece of stretchy cheese around his finger.

“Nothing's going to happen. The bank will take care of it. It's all going to be fixed, don't worry,” Harold said, hoping it was true. He remembered uneasily all the screw-ups the bank had made on their mortgage.

“How does someone steal your identity anyway?” Dylan asked through a mouthful of pizza dough, cheese, and pepperoni.

“Apparently, it's surprisingly easy,” Harold said. “Although it can be complicated, too. My case is complicated.” He still couldn't believe it had happened. “Someone—probably whoever took my wallet—got enough information about me to access my bank accounts. So they withdrew all our money. And there are all sorts of credit card bills—sports cars, you wouldn't believe.”

“How do they do it, though?” Dylan asked, wanting the details.

As Harold explained what the bank manager had told them, Audrey, who still hadn't touched her pizza, blurted out, “It's going to take a lot of work to clear all this up!”

After supper, Harold decided to go for a walk. He wanted to clear his head, and he didn't think sitting in his chair with the newspaper would do the trick tonight. He stepped off the porch into the early stirrings of a storm.

It was a dark, moonless, autumnal evening. As Harold walked along the streets away from the house, the wind wrestled with the trees high above him, whipping the branches around. It wasn't raining yet, but it probably would, Harold thought, realizing that he'd left his umbrella behind. But he was far enough into his walk to think twice about going back to get it. He decided to take his chances.

He came to the end of one residential street and turned down another, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him, his thoughts gloomy, startled each time a dog entered his circle of vision before its owner loomed up behind it at the end of the leash, arm extended.

Harold soon found himself at the edge of Riverdale Park and stopped to cast his gaze far across the valley, in the direction of his childhood home. His thoughts turned to the different trajectories of his life and Tom's. He and Tom were so different—no wonder they'd had such different lives. It was inevitable that they grow apart. Tom had never been depressed. He'd always lived life to the fullest. And thinking of Tom, Harold was startled by the sudden sharpness of his grief. All at once he wanted to weep—for Tom, and for himself.

Harold turned away from the park, walking faster. Eventually, his mind began to empty. He'd even begun to tell himself that with a little fortitude, he'd get through this thing with the bank, when there was an awful, rending crack—enough to put Harold on notice that something really bad was about to happen, but not enough notice for him to be able to do anything about it—and a branch split away from its trunk and came thrashing down, striking Harold on the head and shoulders and knocking him to the ground.

The main part of the branch had missed him—or he'd have been a dead man—but its smaller tributaries, sizable enough, had knocked the wind out of him and now pinned him to the sidewalk. He'd hit his forehead on the sidewalk and he could feel warm blood oozing down his face. He lay still, stunned but conscious, face down with his arms splayed wide beneath the heavy branch. He wished that he'd changed his mind about fetching the umbrella—that would have changed everything. He tentatively moved his fingers and toes a little, then his arms and legs, and found that nothing was broken. There was no paralysis, there wasn't even any pain. That was the upside.

But the branch was too heavy for him. He couldn't simply get up, pull it onto the nearest lawn, and carry on, hoping no one had seen him fall, the way you do when you trip in public.

Suddenly it began to rain. The cold rain revived him, and he began to feel pain—a vicious throbbing in his head and an ache in his shoulders. A light flashed on at the front of the house he was spread-eagled in front of, a door opened and slammed. Someone was running down the walk. Harold pictured him, huddled against the rain.

“Are you all right?” the man asked, obviously alarmed.

For some reason, Harold thought of the opossum, which plays dead to fool its predators. But this man was not a predator; he was here to help.

“I'm fine,” Harold whispered, but even as he said it, he knew he couldn't be heard over the sound of the wind and the rain, and besides, his face was pushed into the concrete.

“Shit!” the man said, and ran away.

Harold gingerly turned his face so that his cheek rested on the sidewalk. He figured when the next person came along, he'd better try to make eye contact.

But it was a big, slobbery dog that came upon him next and started to lick his face, making excited gulping noises and bathing Harold in slimy, smelly saliva. Harold tried not to think about where that tongue might recently have been. A woman bent down, forcing the blonde dog back with her hand on its chest.

“Can you hear me?” the woman asked.

Harold managed a small nod, his eyes open. She pulled out a cell phone and called for help.

Harold heard feet running down the walk again. “I called 911!” the man shouted importantly.

Now people were congregating from all directions, discussing what they should do.

“We'd better get that branch off him,” said one.

“No! Don't move him,” said another.

“It's a city tree,” said the man who owned the house in front of which Harold had been felled, to anyone who would listen.

When the paramedics arrived, Harold recalled that this was the second time in just over a week that men had come for him with an orange stretcher, and everybody knew things happened in threes.

Now a fire truck was careening down the street, lights flashing, siren wailing, and if anybody in the neighbourhood hadn't noticed he was lying flattened beneath a tree on Hampton Avenue, they would now.

As the firefighters consulted about removing the branch, a paramedic squatted down close to Harold and asked him a few questions. Satisfied, the man stood up and talked to the firefighters. Then the branch was off him and they were lifting him onto the stretcher.

“Doesn't look like anything's broken, but you've got a nasty bump there,” the paramedic said sympathetically. “Better get it checked out. You probably have a concussion.”

Harold felt his forehead gingerly. His hand came away sticky with clotting blood. He didn't protest as they hoisted him into the ambulance. He'd never ridden in an ambulance before. He wondered if he would be billed for it.

“Is there anyone you'd like us to call?” asked the paramedic.

Harold nodded, which made his head spin. “My wife, Audrey.” But then he forgot about Audrey as it dawned on him where they were going.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked.

“Toronto East General. You're lucky—it's a quiet night. Still early.”

Harold remembered hearing something about—hadn't Toronto East General recently had a case of flesh-eating disease? “I've changed my mind,” Harold said, sitting up suddenly and trying to reach for the back doors of the ambulance.

“Whoa, buddy,” the paramedic said, pushing him gently back down.

Harold, overcome with dizziness, saw that resistance was futile.

• • •

H
AROLD WAS SITTING
in his old bathrobe and battered slippers in his La-Z-Boy chair. It was the first sick day he'd taken in years. Even on doctor's orders, he still felt mildly guilty, like he was trying to pull a fast one.

Harold made a point of reading the Darwin Awards every year. They cheered rather than entertained him. He would
never
, for example, tie a plastic bag tightly around his head to avoid a bee sting and die of asphyxiation, or stand directly under a heavy branch he was cutting with a power saw. He wasn't
that
lame. But there was no question he was bewildered by modern life.

Today, at home recuperating, he was reading a newspaper account of a man who'd been arrested by Toronto Police for driving the wrong way down a residential street, pants down around his ankles, and using a laptop computer to steal wireless signals to anonymously download child pornography. Harold had to read the article three times to follow what was going on, but once he figured it out, he was fascinated. Not so much by the depravity of this “hacking and whacking,” but by its sophistication.

He couldn't even program his vcr, which was now virtually obsolete anyway, and there were people, Harold marvelled, who had the ingenuity—not to mention the confidence—to drive the wrong way down a one-way street (pants down!) and use a laptop, a networking card, and some software to steal signals out of thin air. It boggled his mind. He was incensed to read that when the police cracked down on users of child pornography, the trail would lead back to the person who owned the network, oblivious inside his house—perhaps reading the paper—and not to the sleazeball who had been downloading it from his car on the street.

At least
that
hadn't happened to him. It couldn't have, because he wasn't sophisticated enough to set up a wireless network in his house in the first place. Harold thought about it for a moment—his name wrongly plastered in the newspaper as a consumer of child pornography, his life ruined—and felt spared.

It worried him though, his failure to adapt. He was most comfortable with the tangible; he liked to work with his hands. He could certainly use a computer, he knew the basics, but it was the people who knew how to grasp stuff right out of the air—they were the ones, Harold thought, who would inherit the earth.

But he was wrenched abruptly out of his thoughts.

“
I couldn't reach your father
.”

It was his mother's voice, speaking quietly. It was as if she was standing right beside him. Harold turned his head, but no one was there. Well, of course not. His mother had died years ago.

The overworked doctor in Emergency had told him he'd suffered a mild concussion, that he might have headaches for a few days, and to go home and take Advil. He hadn't said anything about hallucinations.

“
I couldn't reach your father
.”

He must be hallucinating. This would surely pass. Harold wondered if he should call Dr. Goldfarb.

“You wanted to know if I contacted your father on the other side. I tried, Harold, but I couldn't. I just thought you'd like to know.”

Shit! That was no hallucination—that
was
his mother! Harold felt the panic rising in his throat, the weirdness flooding over him, the alarming palpitation of the heart, the difficulty breathing. He wanted to flee, but he was afraid that if he got up suddenly he might collapse, like he had at the funeral, and that would surely bring Audrey running. So he tried to ignore his mother and buried himself—practically entombed himself—in the newspaper instead. He forced himself to remain still and tried to control his breathing.

But he could feel her presence, and she wouldn't stop trying to get his attention.

“Harold, dear, it's your mother. Listen to me.”

From the kitchen, through the doorway, Audrey was keeping a discreet eye on Harold. A couple of times she saw his head jerk up from his newspaper, his face pale and startled, and look uneasily around the living room before going back to his reading. It was odd behaviour for Harold, who generally ploughed through things slowly and methodically, undistracted.

Well, he
had
been hit on the head, Audrey told herself. Twice. Three times, if you counted the fact that he'd also smacked the front of his head on the pavement when he got whacked on the back of the head by the tree. That had to do something. Just so long as it wasn't permanent.

The doctor in Emergency had instructed her to keep him home for a couple of days and to keep an eye on him, and that's exactly what she was doing. If he started to show odd symptoms, she'd take him back to the hospital whether he liked it or not.

Only he hadn't really been himself even before he'd hit his head the first time, on the coffin, and it was hard to be sure what was from whatever had been bothering him before, and what was from being whacked a couple of times in the head.

But she was pretty sure this was new, she thought worriedly, as Harold's head shot up again and he hissed, “
Go away.
”

What the hell was she to make of that? Anxiously, Audrey threw down the dish towel and hurried to his side.

Harold saw her coming for him, swooping upon him like a valkyrie, and said defensively, looking up at her from his chair, “What?”

“Who were you talking to?” Audrey asked, the crease between her eyes deepening.

He wanted to deny he'd said anything, but she'd obviously been spying on him. It was only his first day at home, and already he longed to go back to the office. “Just a fly,” he said, swatting at the empty air around his head for authenticity.