Whirl Away (20 page)

Dave thought it felt exactly like a contraction: a sharp muscular squeeze, impossible to resist. Like the world suddenly bore down, pushed, and popped him right straight out
into another, very different place with a week's pay for every year on the job. He remembered how, in the good moments, he'd been sure there would be another job long before the severance ran out.

The moment they'd told him, they were already looking over him, past him and on to the next thing. Dave remembered what it had been like with other layoffs, knew the way everyone else in the room didn't even have time to think about how unfair it was because they were so keenly aware about how glad they were it wasn't happening to them.

Linda hung on for a while. Dave knew she might have stayed in the marriage longer if he'd managed to cut back on their expenses quicker, if he'd looked ahead and asked, “What if something doesn't come along?” But Dave hadn't wanted to do that. It struck him all at once when the severance was almost gone, unemployment insurance looming, and he'd found himself at the checkout in the liquor store, buying exactly the same single malt Scotch he always had. “One small luxury,” he had told Linda when he started buying it years earlier, when there was enough of a cushion for tolerance. “That's all I need.”

Every evening, he'd have one small glass of the peaty brown Scotch—nothing special about the glass, either, just a juice glass with a single ice cube in it—and thinking back, Dave wondered what was important about it, whether it was the Scotch itself or the idea of it. The idea of going into the living room with the glass, sitting in his chair with the newspaper while the ice cube melted slowly, the ice occasionally splitting with an audible crack, the order of the world set as
carefully as if it had been framed up and poured with concrete.

Dave wondered where that chair was now, and he wondered where Linda was too. Neither of them were in the rooming house he shared with six other people, two of them recently released from the mental hospital. Social Services paid Dave's rent but little more, and he found it was easier to be outside walking than to stay in the whirlwind of the house, a place where everything seemed completely beyond his control. If he wanted to read a book, there was no guarantee there wouldn't be someone screaming insults in their room, or knocking on his door to see if he could help with a problem one of the other residents was having with welfare or the landlord. “You know numbers, Dave,” would be the half-apologetic explanation for involving him in something that could take the rest of the day. It was easier to be away from the building, easier to keep his thoughts in their own order.

Dave looked down at his knees, at the grey of his trousers and the grey of the concrete step set into the sidewalk. Any trace of a pleat was gone from the fabric; even something as simple as that was beyond him now. His breathing sharp and short, so that his throat was suddenly dry and sore.

The ambulance was up by the curb, and the two paramedics came out through the doors, and when they saw him, when they recognized him, it was like they lost a half step of urgency. It was a man and a woman, and the man said, “Hi, Dave,” as he set the bright orange trauma kit down on the steps. “Same thing, Dave?”

“Hi Tony,” Dave said, his breath rasping. “Same thing.”

“Didn't know it was going to be you again,” the female paramedic said. Her name patch said Patricia, but everyone called her Patty. “We must have brought you in ten times by now.”

“Thanks,” was all Dave could manage. Then Patty was bringing the gurney from the back of the ambulance, and as they wheeled him to the doors, the clear plastic oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, Dave was surprised at how bright the sky was.

Tony was driving, and Dave heard him jog the radio microphone off its rest into his right hand and call the hospital. “Male, fiftyish, vitals good. Trouble breathing.” Then there was a short break, as if Tony was trying to make up his mind about what to say. Looking up from where he was lying on his back, Dave could just make out the shape of the driver against the bright windshield.

“We've got the Gasper, folks,” Tony said. “No lights, no siren.”

And Dave was sure he heard the resignation in Tony's voice when he said it.

The back of the ambulance was full of the grumble of the big diesel engine and the hiss of the oxygen through the mask. The ceiling light was on, and Dave could see the ambulance rocking left and right as it made its way around corners. He watched Patty's body lean back and forth involuntarily with each turn, watched her muscles brace and relax. She didn't look at him, didn't look at the monitors they had
him connected to. Once or twice she looked down at her hands in the blue vinyl gloves, her mouth pursed small, but she didn't say anything.

In ten minutes, they were at the hospital, and the two attendants pulled the gurney out and let the wheels beneath it drop hard into place and lock. Dave watched the roof of the ambulance bay and then the ceiling of the hospital rolling by as he was wheeled into the emergency room. And Tony was talking to the triage nurse, giving her the quick rundown on Dave's symptoms and vital signs. Dave knew enough to know they were treating him differently than they would other patients—no notes, no careful handover with plenty of explanation—and in a way it made him feel smaller.

“We'll take you down to a room until a doctor can see you,” the nurse said. “You breathing all right with the oxygen?”

Dave could only nod, not enough air left to even speak, but the intensity was sliding away, as if his bronchial tubes were fingers that he could feel flexing and easing. Now that it was softening, he knew he'd soon be past it.

The doctor was brief—drive-by medicine with other patients to see. “Are you taking your prescription, Mr. Simpson? Because it's pretty clear you're having a panic attack again. You've got to get this under control—you've been here half a dozen times already this month.”

Dave didn't tell the doctor that there weren't enough dollars left at the end of the month to keep him in pills, or that he was suddenly entranced by the simple feel of the cool, smooth, clean sheets under the side of his face.

There must have been something about the look on his face then, because the doctor looked up from the chart and stared at him for a moment or two, his face inscrutable. “We're not that busy here today, Mr. Simpson,” the doctor said, finishing the chart and hanging it back on the end of the bed, pen quickly back into the pocket on his jacket. “Stay here on the oxygen for a while until you feel up to it. I'll get you discharged after that.”

Dave stayed on his side, studying the weave of the sheet, the lines where the threads came together and the tiny holes between. He put his hand out to feel the rough-washed scrape of the fabric and, deciding his fingers wouldn't be able to feel it well enough, turned his hand over and dragged the back of it across the small hills and valleys, caught up in that one action.

Over the gentle hiss of air from his mask, Dave could hear scattered noises from other parts of the emergency room: the clicking of a piece of nearby equipment, a regular beeping sound and, from across the hall, the sound of someone crying. The other hospital is older, Dave thought, but it's quieter. Like the walls are thicker or something—like different things used to be important. St. Clare's was a little more careworn, chipped paint and older beds. It's funny, he thought, to actually be thinking about which hospital you like better.

Half an hour later, one of the nurses brought a small box of apple juice, the L-shaped straw sticking out of the top. “Just check in with us when you're ready to go,” she said.

Half an hour after that, the drinking box empty, Dave pulled the oxygen mask off his face and swung his legs down
over the side of the bed. When he was outside, he saw three ambulances by the bay, and Tony and Patty had the doors open on theirs, sliding the gurney into the back. He watched for a moment, wavering slightly, and then they saw him. The sun had passed through noon, and Dave squinted to look out across the plain of the parking lot. It was like the sun had gotten whiter while he was in the hospital, the colours of the cars and the trees all flatter than they had been. At least it wasn't raining.

“Cry wolf enough, Dave, and we might not be there when you really need us,” Tony said.

Patty spoke up from the other end of the gurney. “The dispatchers all know your voice by now,” she said.

“I wouldn't call,” Dave said. “I wouldn't call if I didn't have to. But thanks.”

He braced himself to start across the parking lot. It would be a long walk, he thought. It always was.

Dave saw a quick look pass between the two, but it was Tony who spoke. “Want a run back downtown, Dave? We're heading to St. Clare's for a patient transfer anyway.”

Five days later, he was on Water Street, nursing a large coffee, sitting on a stool in a street-front coffee shop. It was raining, large flat drops blowing in against the glass and sliding down in long streaks.

Dave's eyes focused on the running drops, then on the people passing by, his eyes flicking back and forth as they locked onto the changing images, his attention caught by each individual motion. With every passing pedestrian, he
thought there was a little bit of each face that seemed familiar—not like he knew them in particular, but as if there was some reason why he thought he should know them. They passed like water in a river, he thought, heading in their own directions, each one with their own piece of the world safe and sound and trusted. He envied them that, whether it was blind faith or foolish confidence or just plain ignorance.

There's so much you can't control, Dave thought, the coffee cup warm in his hands, no matter what you think, no matter how fast you make your way down the street.

Then he felt the sharp shear, the familiar tightening in his chest.

“Excuse me,” he said, smiling up at the waitress. “I'm . . . I'm not feeling well. Can you call an ambulance?”

T
HERE IS SO LITTLE
left to be dancing for, Keith thought—and when there was dancing, it was him doing soft-shoe in the kitchen, alone, from stove to fridge and back again, getting out an onion, a carrot, the lemons.

Somewhere in the wall, the water was running, a hissing rush he knew better than most other sounds in the house. Was it the pipes that made the sound, he wondered, or the choke point of the tap, toning the pressure down? When it was flowing, the sound of the water radiated from the pipes to wherever he was in the house, so that anything from the dishwasher to the shower could make its own throat clearing and steady comment.

Funny, he thought, how sounds can actually seem accusing.

It was Anna in the shower, washing the angry right down into her skin. The water so hot that she'd come out branded in red blotches across her back, marked with flags combining her penitent frustration with slowly developing fury.

Once, he would have listened for that shower, for those sentinel calling pipes, like a bloodhound scenting lost children, his face high towards the ceiling, his head turning back and forth to triangulate the sound, just so he could rush up the stairs to join her, pulling his sweatshirt over his head as he took the stairs two at a time. Opening the bathroom door because knocking was unnecessary, just like invitations were. She would be expecting him anyway, obeying a kind of naked hunger that neither of them was remotely embarrassed about. Dancing together through the curtain of drops. Wet rhythm, tango, rumba. Tile-rattling, grout-gripping pas de deux.

Anna was always eager in a way that pulled him right out of himself. With Anna, he thought, you might start out self-conscious and self-aware, but the concept of being separate and self-contained melted away quickly.

They'd met in university and had somehow managed to hang on through that curious gap when graduates suddenly change from moving in one similar direction to casting out along their own individual routes. Keith couldn't help but think that staying together was mostly her doing, that she had managed against serious odds to drag him through with her, an alchemy made easy by the lure of all that raw desire.

Anna, with her intense face caught in a tight frame of short blond hair. A woman who'd always had a penchant for hiding herself inside clothes large enough to be someone else's, a woman you found like a small and important discovery.

She had planned on postgraduate work in English, but when the fellowship didn't come through, she'd wound up
as a newspaper reporter, doomed to the entertainment beat and the crushing duty of interviewing up-and-comers who were always on their way to somewhere else while Anna stayed solidly, pointedly, in the same place.

Keith, at one time, carried a brief fantasy of heading somewhere, almost anywhere, else. He'd toyed with the idea of the police or the military, and ended up turning sideways into a surprisingly simple job inspecting elevators and pressurized tanks for the provincial government. The inspections were so routine he couldn't remember the last time one of the pieces of equipment had actually failed: a page or two of copied visual inspection reports, with boxes to check off and the occasional single line for a written comment. There was the all-important space at the bottom to mark and initial, but only after the fee was paid.

Keith could work all day and then be completely unable to remember the location of the last building he'd been in, the work stretching out behind him in a seemingly endless collection of cables, grease, pulleys and confined spaces. When someone lost something down the crack between the elevator car and the shaft, they never, ever went looking for it. It was like people were expecting something unknown in the dark—monsters under the bed. So Keith found change and keys and sometimes toys at the bottom of any number of elevator shafts, abandoned because asking for help was too much trouble.