We Are Not in Pakistan (22 page)

Why isn't Philip more curious about mystery? He once said he doesn't have a clue how any of his drugs — succinylcholine, sodium pentothol — work. He just knows they do. Like the guy who did that hypnotist act at Jason's for a while. All Philip needs to know is how to switch a mind off, switch it on.

He'd love to do the same with his wife. Probably wished he could switch her off tonight.

She spoons coffee into the well of the Braun and, as the steady brown stream begins, tiptoes downstairs to the basement for a pair of socks, a sweatshirt and sweat pants from the sports closet. She drops her evening gown to the kitchen floor. She listens for movement upstairs.

All quiet up there. She changes.

She wraps herself in her coat and a heavy blanket from the hall closet, unfolds a canvas deck chair on the patio and settles in, coffee cup warming cold fingers, to watch the night sky.

If she could, she'd switch her mind on and off herself. Go into what Philip calls the twilight space between sleep and brain death. Philip's probably asleep right now or she'd ask him: when
you induce anesthesia, how do you make damn sure your patient's heart and lungs keep pulsing? And the rest of her organs, the involuntary ones? What about a patient's mind?

Would it keep chattering?

Tania's would chatter a whole pile of crap — even after etiquette lessons.

A year ago, Philip took her to a Queen Street office with cherry wood panelling and funeral parlour-style paintings to see a therapist he knew from his undergraduate days at Western. This was right after Tania had a screaming fit, shouting that he was killing her. That everything she thought was fun was either a no-no or too risky.

The therapist, a tall guy with glasses and an elbow-patched sweater that made him look older, began by asking where they met. From the way he said it, gazing at Tania's cleavage, she could tell he remembered her from the bachelor party.

“Talk about your expectations of marriage,” he said, but Philip acted as if he didn't have any. All he wanted, he said, was to keep Tania safe, and he couldn't understand why she was so upset — he forbade her nothing.

“Nothing forbidden, eh?” said the therapist.

Tania sat mostly silent, the desk between her and the men. Like they were expecting to hear knocking and see the paintings tremble.

The therapist asked, “Do you plan to have children?”

Tania shook her head. She couldn't imagine looking after a child or children. Ma had taken her to the doctor for her first birth control prescription at fourteen, right when she got her first period — insurance in their neighbourhood — and taking it had become a ritual ever since.

But then she glanced over at Philip and thought, hey, if Philip wanted a baby, why not? She'd oblige. Taking kids to school or hockey games would require a second car.

“No,” said Philip. “Before the epidural, it's like a limb amputation without anesthesia.”

Tania could see the doctor thought she should feel touched by Philip's concern, but she wasn't. “Your ma must have gone through it,” she said, “or you wouldn't be here.”

Philip's ma wouldn't have done it natural — she's like Philip, and not just about pain. She won't even take a vacation to Jamaica or Cuba with her friends for fear she might see poor people, and certainly she'd never visited Tania's area of Windsor. She'd think it dirty, ugly, poor, run-down — no beautiful Toronto people.

Soon their fifty paid minutes were up.

As the therapist ushered them out, she felt two thick fingers inserting themselves into the back pocket of her jeans.

“How do you feel now?” Philip asked as they got in the car. Like the question hurt to ask.

“I feel nothing.”

He nodded and patted her hand.

She drew a hundred-dollar bill wrapped around the therapist's business card out of her pocket and held it on her lap where he could see the card. And the money.

Philip glanced down at the card and the money on Tania's lap. Then his eyes returned to the road.

“No pain anywhere?”

Did Philip think his friend's obvious admiration of his wife — or his wife's boobs — was a compliment to his good taste? Did he think it was a joke? On whom?

Philip seemed to imagine that he had accomplished a gallant rescue in whisking her away from dancing at Jason's. And what did he expect in return? Her gradual retreat to his castle and the
guarantee she would perform only for him and a select few.

Like in Saudi Arabia.

No big deal — Philip was like her old boyfriend, the one who'd gotten her into dancing at Jason's in the first place. Or maybe like one of those professors who'd stand and watch her dancing with that look that said, I'm only here for research.

She wouldn't have to go as far as before, but was it much different?

“No pain,” she said firmly, staring ahead.

“I can't be responsible for making you happy, Tania.” Philip set the cruise control. “You should really try to find happiness for yourself.”

But damn right, Philip was responsible for making her happy. Every girl at Jason's dreamed of a guy like him, a Dr. Prince Charming who'd take her away, marry her, make her rich and happy … and then if she wasn't happy, he was, yeah, like,
responsible.

Even so, by the time they got home, she got to thinking, okay, maybe he was right, and she would try and find happiness for herself, because Philip sure as hell wasn't going to do it for her.

They didn't go back to the therapist — not that she minded, but maybe Philip did mind about the card and the hundred-dollar bill.

And then Philip took over the shopping, which only made things worse. And it was impossible to complain that things were getting worse, even if there were someone to complain to, when he would call every afternoon at four to get her grocery list before leaving the hospital and end with his canned, “I love you.”

Sometimes he picked up cat or dog food instead of her t wo daily Slimfast shakes, but usually he bought everything on her list. Tania no longer had any idea what things cost or what was available, and Philip never seemed to notice that she cooked the same seven dinners over and over.

Daily, she cleaned with the determination of a fifties housewife, took long walks and runs on the deserted country roads, came back and made dinner.

But when she told him she was jogging, Philip warned her about black bears. After that, Tania no longer jogged out of sight of the house.

Once he took her to a street festival in Toronto. And stayed with her every minute, pincer-grip on her elbow, steering firmly. And sometimes, like tonight, he took her to official dinners where he needed a wife beside him. Usually she stayed quiet and didn't screw up.

Tania's bottom is frozen to the lawn chair, despite her coat and blanket and the unseasonably mild night. Damp seeps into her shivering, still-waiting form. A semi-crushed Slims she had stashed in the kitchen drawer for emergencies dangles from her fingers. When she finishes, she stubs it out in the flowerbed, pulls on a pair of black gloves, and resumes her wait.

It's two-thirty when the Leonids arrive, sparking over the empty pool, lacerating the basalt bowl of the cold night sky, too swift for a telescope. Tania smells burning, but no, that can't be. She listens for an electrical crackling or the hiss of a storm, but there is no sound. She debates if she should wake Philip — a couple of years ago, she might have tried, invited him to watch this display of natural fireworks with her.

Never mind Philip.

There should be celestial music, music — a tiny laugh puffs from her nose — that Philip could dismiss as New Agey. Meteors have edged out the stars now, and still they fall. Her soul thrills. Waves of faint, fast-moving points, the meteors rise as if from a common origin, set the sky ablaze. Light streaks arc as they fall.
Their smoke trains linger through the cold night. The Leonids come from so far beyond, beyond anything she has ever seen, anything she has ever felt, sparking, falling, fizzing … what would it feel like to be one of them? Flying up — oh joy, joy — higher, higher, high as she can go. At the top top top of the curve she knows the terror-fall of the meteor, feels herself begin to fall fall fall toward the dark yawn of the pool, flying with one small fragment that has hurtled out of its assigned orbit, streaming particles of itself everywhere, screaming through the heavens with the ferocious pain, the burn and shock of entry as it comes down. Then another one, up up up …

Tania stands on tiptoe, now laughing out loud. Every sense is awake, every nerve afire, every synapse smoking. She holds up her hands as if to catch one as it showers its trail of stardust over the planet.

When the last of the smoke trains fades, Tania is trembling. She hasn't felt such joy in five years, in this someone-else's life.

Every moment, every moment should be lived like that. With that passion. Yeah! With intensity. Yeah! And awareness. Yeah! Like that! Live like you're on the path of a fireball.

Tania pulls her gloves off. She swings the telescope toward her and adjusts it to focus on the pool. The Movado cuffing her left wrist glows to equal the gold bracelet cuffing her right — each came in a Birks blue box, one for their third, the other for their fifth anniversary.

Happiness doesn't always come in a blue box.

If, impossibly, a fireball did crash in that dark pit, it would be lost till morning. CBC said that if you came upon a fragment, you'd miss it completely, think it an ordinary rock. That in the light of day, there would be nothing beautiful about a single Leonid particle.

Even meteors leave parts of themselves in places they don't want to be, run into pits they can't get out of. Even meteors can't
go home the way they came. And look spent and ordinary in the morning.

But oh the beauty, the beauty along the way.

It's a sign. For her, for Ma, for Philip, even Philip's mom — the rise and fall of the meteors is a sign.

I gotta have pain. I gotta have fear, danger, terror, ugliness and ordinariness along with beauty and comfort and joy. Nothing beautiful and no joy happens without pain.

Mrs. Philip Trent has been standing very still on the patio for hours. She's wearing black gloves again. The coat she wears is open. The blanket is draped around her.

Tania wants to tell her if she does not go now, this minute, on the heels of this night, she will never leave.

If Mrs. Philip Trent stays now, she will never again feel a meteoric exhilaration nor the terror of despair. She will stay in this house, bounded by fear, till she feels nothing deeper than a gentle melancholy to be alleviated by Prozac.

Mrs. Trent will then progress to the age when living is a chore. The worst that will ever happen to her might be a washer breakdown. Perhaps sickness, later the irritable regrets of a well-medicated old age.

But Mrs. Philip Trent seems to have something left to do here. She is dropping her blanket on the patio and going into the kitchen. She is peeling off her black gloves. She is taking a very sharp knife from the drawer by the sink. Is that Mrs. Trent who is holding her arm out before her, Mrs. Trent opening the patio door? A dripping arm leads Mrs. Trent down the stone path, down the steps into the empty pool.

Perhaps Dr. Philip will find Mrs. Trent in a few hours, wake
her with a princely kiss, bring her out of stasis, like a patient etherized upon his table.

Or perhaps he won't know how to switch her on again.

Tania zips her coat, closes and locks the patio door and returns to the kitchen. She stops briefly in the hall to lace on a pair of running shoes and pick up the keys and her handbag. Off come the gleaming Movado and the Birks bracelet. In a few minutes she's behind the wheel of Philip's Merc, swinging out of the driveway and away.

She hums out loud, Tracy Chapman, not opera. And so what if she sounds crazy — who cares! Just imagine Philip's face when he finds his car gone.

Red and pink streaks appear like burst vessels across corneal blue. The illumination from her headlights merges with the dawn.

Larry Reilly slides open his balcony door and takes a seat overlooking the lawn. Only a week since he unpacked his boxes in number 101. He doesn't miss the rake or shovel he left behind. The music teacher who bought his ranch home must have inherited money — Larry would never have paid as much. He's not going to miss climbing ladders to clean leaves from clogged rain gutters, descending basement stairs with the laundry or having to fix the furnace. At the yard sale, his grandpa's crank telephone brought in more than the computer his grandson Ronan gave him. And now Larry is content in his newly minted two-bedroom condo. His Social Security is automatically deposited every month, along with the company pension that has kept on trucking for eighteen years, since he was sixty.

Gertrude no longer disturbs him with her snoring — he has his own room and a new bed. It took a while, but Larry has brought Trudy the joy of a dishwasher at seventy-six, and a kitchen so open she can watch the TV in the living room as she cooks. And if she's not feeling up to cooking, he can escort her down to the dining room.

Larry never misses Mass each Sunday with Trudy. Unlike the kike in number 109 down the carpeted hall, or the Lutheran kraut
in number 111. He's pretty darn sure Trudy is going to heaven and he wouldn't want to get left behind — no one else would know all the little stuff he needs. Besides, the night the kamikaze hit his ship in the Pacific, the force that propped him and his mates up in life preservers till rescuers found them had something of the supernatural about it.

A young black man in a jacket with gold lettering waves as he rides a lawnmower across the front lawn.

There was a time when a strong coloured buck like that wouldn't have it so cushy, wouldn't be doing much more than washing dishes.

Larry,
he tells himself,
you live in the best country in the world.