When Is a Man (2 page)

Yesterday, Paul had begun his drive from the coast, heading eastward from the Fraser Valley onto the Hope-Princeton highway and then beyond. He navigated the switchbacks and winding passes slowly and cautiously. The approach was queasily intimate, uterine. The landscape held the vehicle close to itself, and Paul was drawn forward and upward by the loops and convulsions of the rivers and mountains.

He shouldn't have been driving. “It's a little early in your convalescence for such a road trip,” his doctor had said. “Sitting for too long, getting jarred around.” Nearly every gas station became a pit stop. Once he pulled over along the beetle-ravaged clear cuts above Princeton, where the hillsides were stripped bare, and tossed a damp incontinence pad into a slash pile. At the edge of a vineyard outside Keremeos, he leaned against a fence and massaged his perineum while he dribbled urine into the sagebrush and wiped frustrated tears from his cheeks. Each stop was a battle between churning, sobbing brain and spastic detrusor muscle that clenched in search of the prostate gland. The body alien to its damaged self, the mind shamed by passing traffic, quick stares.

He'd been released from the hospital in late June and e-mailed the department of anthropology and his supervisor, Dr. Elias Tamba. He told them what they needed to know, or in Dr. Tamba's case what he already knew: the only thing in worse shape than Paul's health was his dissertation. Nor would he come back to teach in the fall. He spent some time with his parents, who had driven him to the hospital and then stayed for his first difficult night of intravenous drips, drain tubes, and morphine. His mother, who'd worked as a receptionist in a doctor's office for many years, arranged his apartment to make it more comfortable for him, and bought what she felt would be the best foods. She was much calmer about the whole thing than the two men. His father, a civil engineer, was close to retirement and well past the age at which the prostate ceases to be an abstract idea—Paul knew his father had been tested several times. He acted puzzled and guilty, as though he believed that through some strange karma or bad thought he'd passed on his own inevitable fate to his son.

Paul's ex-girlfriend, Christine, showed up to play nursemaid, and this had been hard. She provided sympathy, a voice, but said nothing about her own life, how her research was going, if she'd fallen in love again. They'd barely spoken in months. He suspected she might be secretly dating Dr. Tamba. She'd cut her hair and her body looked fit and toned, as though she were no longer losing sleep over her thesis or career and had started rock climbing again, her skin radiant with success or sex. All this hinted at the happiness she hid from him as he lay on the couch with his catheter and collection bag.

He'd phoned Tanner two weeks after coming home from the hospital. They'd been friends since an undergrad biology class several years earlier but had only spoken a few times since Tanner had taken work as a fisheries biologist. Paul had been caught up in research and teaching, while Tanner started a new life in the Immitoin Valley. The last time they'd talked had been after Paul's trip to Sweden, the year before his surgery. Tanner had moved in with Beth, a girl from Kitsilano he'd met when he and Paul were roommates. They'd bought a house on two acres outside Shellycoat. He had steady work, long-term contracts with Monashee Power, a hydroelectric company, and the local Streamkeepers Association. But—the weirdest change of all—Tanner had just become the chairman of Shellycoat's new film festival. Had Paul heard of it?

“Of course not,” Paul had said, sighing into the phone.

“Set to run in November. I'm slammed.” Dozens of films to screen before the final selections, volunteers to organize. “And meanwhile, this contract buries me in the boonies for two straight months, starting in August. August! Like,
fuck me
, you know? What's up with you?”

Paul offered up some vague details about the cancer, and his decision to abandon both his
PhD
and his teaching. He and Tanner were college buddies in the truest sense, only comfortable talking about sexual conquests or personal disasters that were sort of funny in retrospect—like Sweden, or Naomi, or even Christine. Anything else was off-limits.

“So you won't be well enough to teach by September?” Tanner asked.

“I could, technically, I guess. Sure. It's just . . .”

Tanner didn't probe too deep. He phoned Paul back a couple of hours later to offer him a job. “It's the perfect gig,” he said. “You need some down time, I can tell. Time to reflect.” Paul almost snorted: reflect. That didn't sound like his old friend. It sounded like Beth, who had always struck him as the flaky type. Still, Tanner wasn't entirely wrong.

The work was easy, Tanner told him. Live beside Basket Creek where it meets the Immitoin River and count the bull trout trapped in a set of weirs each night. Measure, weigh and tag 'em, let 'em go, write it in a notebook. Done.

Eight hours after leaving the coast, Paul reached a junction where the main highway continued east, toward Christina Lake and over the Paulson Summit to the West Kootenays, while the smaller highway cut north, following the Immitoin to Shellycoat. The sun was low on the horizon, filtered through the smoke of distant forest fires, and the light flickered orange and pink across the turbulent, shifting waters. He arrived in Shellycoat at sunset, greeted first by the towering stacks of a pulp mill that seemed too quiet and empty, even for this time of day. Only a handful of trucks sat in the parking lot, and lumber lay stacked and forgotten in the far corner of the yard. He passed a row of service stations, an industrial yard full of yellow highway maintenance trucks, an A&W, and then arrived in what he took for downtown—a handful of streets and avenues, the main street lined with mom-and-pop stores, a saloon-styled bookstore, a Mexican-themed coffee shop. Tanner had found him a room at a hotel instead of offering a spare bed or couch at his place, though Paul would have said no anyway. After that drive, the last things he wanted were questions, curious stares, and sympathy. He was haggard and wasted, especially between the legs, and was ready for an Epsom salts bath and some television.

He used to enjoy road trips, rolling exhausted into places he'd never been. Sparked by the unfamiliar, his mind would organize people and things into broad categories, even consider possible ethnographic studies, like the working lives and relationships of the female flaggers who controlled traffic at highway construction sites. Once, he would have been fascinated by the grab-bag of characters who wove their way between the hand-painted signboards that cluttered Shellycoat's sidewalks: forestry workers covered in a film of sawdust and chainsaw oil, unabashedly filthy as they sauntered into the grocery store; the dreadlocked and sandalled, filthy in their own way; tourists dragging their children behind them and gazing through the windows of closed galleries, trinket shops, and outdoor equipment stores. A dozen questions flashed through Paul's mind, an assortment of connections and possibilities presented themselves—ethnographies of resource-based communities, tourist economies—and faded. Something inside him had been snipped out, excised.

In the brown-curtained hotel room, he flicked through television stations and finally settled on the local weather network. He left the station on and ran a bath. Immersed, he stirred the water and contemplated, as he had hundreds of times in the last few weeks, his body invaded and altered.

He still resembled himself. He'd undergone no chemotherapy or radiation, so the retreat of his black curls from his forehead was natural, maybe stress-related. The unilateral prostatectomy—the removal of his prostate, including his seminal vesicles—hadn't shocked his body into complete weight loss. In fact, he'd packed on a few pounds from lying on his couch all summer. If not for his paleness, the atrophy of his arm and leg muscles so out of proportion with his expanding gut, someone might have mistaken him for a healthy man. Enough, though, of this timid circumnavigation—a bath always came down to his groin and incision site. All summer he'd carried out the doctor's measures of hygiene, done his Kegel exercises to help with bladder control, cleaned his scars and limp genitals as he might an infected toe.

The echo of sloshing water reminded him that he hadn't stayed in a hotel since Sweden more than a year ago. There was—had been—something erotic about occupying a hotel room alone. Anticipation lingered in the air, like a psychic residue left by the previous guests. No matter how drab, each room hummed—along with the bad wiring, dodgy light fixtures, and haunted air ducts—with a promise that his surroundings were a type of moral
tabula rasa
. In Skinnskatteberg, he'd heard a woman come into his room while he showered, a cleaning lady there to drop off fresh linens and towels. Her voice (“Housekeeping? Sir?”) carried the unmistakable inflections of someone young and new to the job, a teenager or immigrant. As he stood under the torrent of water, he'd imagined her sitting on the corner of his bed, waiting . . .

He heard laughter, an uncontrolled hacking cough from the streets below, men and women spilling in and out of a pub, the twin slam of truck doors. There should have been a small thrill in this, like so many times before, listening to the voices of strangers drift through the clouded glass of a bathroom window. The unknown night, the unknown town. The only real possibilities in life lay in the erotic. Something he'd said once, and it frightened him now, because he still believed it.

In the morning, he met Tanner in front of the hotel. Because they'd spoken on the phone—and, Paul believed, because men did not readily acknowledge the passage of time—they greeted each other with a brief handshake, the same grins of two years ago. Still, it must have shocked Tanner—Paul thought he caught a startled look, quickly veiled—to see his pasty skin, his emaciated arms and shoulders.

“So,” Tanner said. He grinned through a hastily groomed reddish beard. “What kind of stories you got for me?”

“Stories?” Paul licked his lips. “Oh—well, good drive here. Feel fine.”

“Yeah?” Tanner kept nodding, eyebrows raised. “Whole new outlook on things, I imagine. Second chance at life and all that.”

“I guess. I pee myself sometimes, if that's what you mean.”

“Well, that's a start.” Tanner pointed up the street. “There's the theatre.” He rubbed his hands together. “Man, I'm just—hope you're around for this, it's going to be—Iceland! Did I tell you that? Two films from Iceland. Haven't even seen them yet, but that's the kind of thing I hoped for. First year, and we're already international.”

“Great,” said Paul. “So, groceries.”

“Right. Sure thing.”

Paul followed him to the store, where they bought enough supplies to last him a week or so. Then they drove out to a storage unit facility near a gas station just outside of town to pick up the trailer and the materials needed to construct the fish barrier: rebar, a roll of wire fencing, and wood for the upstream and downstream weirs. They loaded the materials, hitched the trailer, and headed out.

The highway ascended gradually toward the monolithic concrete wall of the McCulloch Dam. At the bottom of the spillway, whirlpools foamed and churned against gigantic, jagged boulders, rip-rap enclosed in heavy metal mesh. Past the dam, on the reservoir, a marina docked a few dozen boats, most of them small and rudimentary day-cruisers, although the occasional cabin-cruiser or sailboat towered above them. The marina office itself was old and poorly kept, all chipped paint and rusted metal. On the other side of the highway, unpaved roads disappeared into the hills or led to houses and fenced fields that pastured horses and cattle. Everything became more desolate by degrees, which somehow served to lift Paul's mood. He was withdrawing, and was just beginning to savour this sense of exile when they turned the corner and were met by a cop's raised hand and a crowd of sickened faces.

2

They left the flashing lights and commotion behind and continued on to Basket Creek. Another policeman met them at the top of the narrow side road that led from the main road down to the site. “Almost wrapped up here and I'll let you drive in,” he said, then jogged down to a levelled clearing among the trees where a second officer was jimmying open an old truck. Paul and Tanner stood outside and leaned against the trailer, facing the sun.

“Strange place to drown,” Tanner said.

“Could be someone else's truck,” Paul said quietly.

“No, it's his. The owner wouldn't be far away otherwise.”

A few moments passed. “What do you mean, strange?” Paul asked.

“Just strange.” Tanner checked his watch. “Riverbank isn't that high, and it's stable. Water's shallow at the edge. No real hazards, unless you're some drunk teenager on an inner tube, or a child. Or stupid.” Tanner started to grin, probably on the verge of cracking some joke, but stopped. Paul shuddered, still queasy.