by Norman Crane
I live in Canada. I write books. I’m also a historian, a wise guy and a cinephile. When I’m not writing, I’m probably reading or trying to cook. Philip Dick, Haruki Murakami and Graham Greene are some of my favourite authors. I enjoy fiction that makes me curious because curiosity makes me creative. I peer under mossy rocks, knock on hollow trees and believe in hidden passageways—not because I have proof of their existence, but because imagining them is itself the reward. I like non-fiction for the same reason. I also like computers, text editors and mechanical keyboards.
For more info and links to my writing, please visit my website: normancrane.ca
Quarterville my destination. World of my childhood, town of my upbringing, victim of my soon-to-be inglorious return. Evening’s falling and I’m still on the highway. My Mazda’s not had this much exercise in ages. I haven’t driven this much in years. My eyelids feel heavier with each kilometre, but the flash of headlights on the signs overhanging the highway keep me alert. Some say how far I need to go; others, in orange LCD lettering, instruct me how to properly install a child safety seat. Occasionally, I’m reminded not to drink and drive—and, therefore, to arrive alive. Ahead, one semi-trailer truck decides to pass another and I’m stuck behind both for several minutes. Other drivers honk, I pass the time in reflective silence. The paper cup in my cup holder sits empty, its few remaining milky drops sticking to the sides like caffeinated raindrops, and for the umpteenth time I take the cup, invert it and try to suck the drops out. I could stop for a refill, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t have the energy to start up again. I’ve barely eaten. Although there’s no reason why I have to arrive in Quarterville tonight, I make my own reason: I’ve made up my mind and I shall will myself to bend reality to its demands. On the other hand, it’s just driving. For some this is the epitome of relaxation. Gentle traffic, warm weather, the fairly open road and all of North America at the tips of my tires so long as nobody stops me at the U.S. border. Maybe someday I’ll drive to Georgia, New Mexico, California, but not this day. This day, yawning, I know I’ll be satisfied to make it to Quarterville, Ontario. The only border standing in my way is psychological. I suspect the guards on duty there will really work me over. I expect a lengthy questioning, after which they will hand me a document along with a teddy bear, and stamp my passport with the message: “Regressing”.
And under their watchful gaze, I’ll sign my name.
Broken-hearted.
Thoughts of Rosie eclipse thoughts of metaphysics, and squeezing my wet eyelids together without closing them I push both out of my mind by focusing on practicalities.
I know I’ll have a place to stay in Quarterville in what I diligently force myself to refer to as “my parents’ home” (my legal mind keeps more efficiently calling it “home”), but I’ll want to get out of there as soon as possible. The potentiality of living with my parents does not fill me with joy. I also have minor savings, both in my wallet and my bank account, so I don’t need to find a job immediately. However, I’ll try. I’ll also try to make friends and especially someone to help me forget Rosie. I fire a barrage of curses at her, each of which hurts me more than the last. Maybe more than one someone, consequently. A litany of someones, all of whom I’ll treat as horribly as Rosie treated me. I pass a sign informing me I have less than a hundred kilometres to go, aghast at my desire to hurt innocents as a pointless act of revenge against Rosie. I backtrack to the idea of making friends because that’s a less shameful topic. I can make them: at the local bars, at a community pottery class, out of the pottery itself, or plasticine, papier mache, words. The surrealism of the English language makes me laugh out loud. That it nevertheless manages to accurately describe my life is not quite as funny.
I make Quarterville a few minutes after 8 p.m., taking the single off-ramp by which the town hooks itself to the highway. Undo that hook and the town would fall off the face of the Earth. I slow down to the maximum 50 km/h, reach an intersection and wait for the light to change to green. In the meantime, I look around at the familiar places that nevertheless seem foreign: to my left, the colossal car assembly plant where so many Quartervillains, including my parents, work; to my right, family-owned Benson’s General Hardware, flanked by two fast food franchises, one selling sandwiches and the other pizza. In the near forward distance, a few houses share the scenery with car dealerships, a municipal building and a smattering of light industry baring interchangably generic names (“Alvaro Inc.”, “HVG Corporation”, “Lindle & Sons”). The businesses, most of which supply the assembly plant, are new. The houses are old. Behind me, the still audible highway ends the town with a certainty usually reserved for denied Supreme Court appeals. Beyond that is endless, rolling southern Ontario farmland. I imagine red barns, Holstein cows and the odd Amish horse and buggy.
Spotting green, I tap the accelerator.
I’m heading north. I pass the 24-hour grocery store, twin gas stations that never advertise the same price, the municipal and county libraries (the latter in the basement of the former), one of Quarterville’s two elementary schools, its only public high school, the park where I used to sneak off to play hacky sack during class, and most other buildings you’d expect to find in a town of 20,000 people. There’s also a community complex housing an Olympic sized pool where I saw my first naked woman, a Canadian Tire, a hockey arena and an ageing hospital. Downtown, if it can be called that, is a street of squashed, two-storey buildings equal parts quaint and gaudy that resembles Main Street America visualized by a classical Hollywood set designer. Despite myself, this landscapes evokes in me a sense of nostalgia. That’s why I speed up.
I cross the polluted Black Maple river and the two sets of railroad tracks that serve as Quarterville’s belt line, although there’s hardly a “wrong side of the tracks” here. The police station, nestled between them, serves as a prime example of boneheaded town planning.
The moment I turn into the subdivision where my parents live, I begin to feel the flutter of butterflies in my stomach. Actually, they’re more like winged worms. I’m not sure why I’m nervous. I’ve nothing to fear, only an online video to be ashamed of; but my parents don’t have to know about the video, and I’m confident I have enough courage to tell them I was fired.
I roll along the gentle curve of the road.
The house comes into view.
Here is where I spent my formative years. Shoveling the driveway, mowing the grass—
I can’t get my employment history out of my head. I’m already preparing the C.V. I plan to type up tomorrow.
I park behind my dad’s SUV, cut my Mazda’s engine and sit stewing in conflicting states of mind. The trees on my parents’ front lawn, visible through the passenger’s window, seem to continue moving. I’m a failure, I think. No, my entire future is ahead of me. Those are not mutually exclusive, the winged worms communicate to me in Morse code. In the house, the lights come on and my mom’s face appears in the window facing the street. Even failures have futures: dark, dreary ones stuck in a never ending November. More importantly, the winged worms make known to me, these futures are always lonely and Rosie-less. My mom smiles. I can hear her yell something, probably to my dad. (“The unemployed one has arrived.”) They know I’m here. They don’t yet know I’m unemployed. Did I seriously feel brave enough to tell them? Because, stepping out of my car, all I feel is the urge to procrastinate. Walking to the door, that urge grows, killing the winged worms but giving life to a different breed of creeper, rationalization. They say there’s no cure for this disease: the legal mind. Reason is the slave of passion, wrote Hume. I read Hume in law school, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I was still idealistic then. Now, I still don’t know what he meant, but I feel his meaning as well as I feel the existence of my own nose. I’ve allowed myself to entertain the possibility of delaying the telling of a painful truth; reason latched on and supplied me with the arguments to support that conclusion. By the time I ring the doorbell, a conclusion is exactly what it is. My mom pulls the front door wide open. My dad is standing just behind her. They’re both beaming. “Oh, Beaver!” she cries, and launches at me one of the best hugs I can remember.
My dad pats my back. “We’re so glad you’re home.”
The pair of them stare with loving eyes but ask no questions. Vaguely unnerving, it nonetheless makes me feel welcome.
To break the hypnosis, I slip off my shoes and make a beeline for the kitchen, where my mom boils water before steeping tea, and my dad assumes his favourite position at the kitchen table. I talk to him about football, the backyard deck they’ve recently constructed, and international affairs, to her about the weather and how well I’ve been feeding myself with fruits and vegetables. They’re separate, simultaneous conversations, but as long as I keep them going I can avoid the real topics. I get the sense my parents want to avoid them too. When the tea is done, my mom pours and the three of us do a crossword puzzle. It’s just like old times. I am the prodigal son, returned to supply the answers to 5 down and 11 across. I don’t know if I should feel happy about that or not, but it’s certainly pleasant and lets me forget for a while that I don’t even have a spare change of clothes.
At 10:30 p.m., my dad goes to shower and my mom shows me to my old bedroom, which she denies cleaning despite a glaring absence of dust. “Thanks,” I say.
“For what?”
I shrug. She must have started preparing the room when I called from the highway this morning.
“It’s still your room, you know,” she says.
“I know.”
She gives me a motherly look. “So stop standing there like a stick in the mud.” Once upon a time, we called my bedroom the Beaver’s Den.
“I’m just numb from all the driving.”
“Well, there are fresh sheets on the bed and your clothes are still in the closet,” she says, using her usual passive voice. She doesn’t do housework; housework gets done. I smile at knowing her so well. “There’s also a Tupperware container full of leftover dinner in the fridge, and more food in the pantry…”
“Thank you,” I repeat.
She hugs me like she did at the front door. “Stop saying that, would you? You’re not a guest.”
What if I want to be? When my dad finishes showering, my mom takes her turn, and I spend half an hour watching football highlights on the internet with him: the best goals of the season from various European leagues. I know him pretty well too. Whenever a compilation features thumping background music, he mutes it. Of the current players, he’s partial to Messi, Robben and Lewandowski. We also watch clips of Roman Riquelme and Alvaro Recoba, two brilliant South American midfielders who couldn’t adapt to the European game. As an immigrant who made it, I think it makes my dad proud to know not everyone did.
At midnight my mom chases him off to bed.
They have work in the morning.
Left alone, I go through my closet and sort my clothes. None are worthy of a professional, but they’re clean, comfortable and most still fit me. I’m surprised at most and visit the bathroom, where, with a touch of horror, the scale confirms exactly how much weight I’ve put on since I was last here. I vow to lose the extra fat. I also measure my blood pressure using my dad’s monitor. Not terrible, but elevated. I vow to exercise regularly.
Of course, both vows only start applying tomorrow, so tonight I take plenty of pleasure in opening the kitchen fridge, eyeballing the leftovers my mom mentioned, and heating them in the microwave—pulling open its door just before the expiring timer starts to beep so as not to wake anyone. I’ve missed my mom’s cooking. I dig in. Between bites, I listen to the familiar music of the house at night: frogs croaking by the pond outside, my dad snoring, the water softener turning on downstairs. When a train rumbles by and I barely notice the noise, I realise how conditioned I am to living here. In the city, I never got used to the distant scream of police sirens.
I wash the Tupperware container and proceed to the business at hand: planning how to tell my parents I got fired.
Because I’m still licking my lips, savouring the taste of a reheated home cooked meal, I decide I’ll tell them in the morning, after treating them to breakfast. It’s the least I can do. More importantly, the food will lull them into a good mood and their need to hurry to work will cut short any discussions. Discussions could lead to details, and details need to be protected. I’ve not checked how many views my YouTube video has had, but I can allow no leaks of information. The video must remain hidden. Edward Snowden is unwelcome here.
I get my tablet from my car and browse recipe websites from the step leading to the front door.
The WiFi password’s unchanged.
Clouds obscure the stars.
The street is dead at this hour, but the wind—passing across the deadness—picks up sufficient speed to become a soft breeze that reminds me of Rosie’s touch.
Shuddering, I choose a recipe for shrimp and avocado omelettes.
I don’t know why I choose this one. I do know, without needing to check, that my parents possess neither of the key ingredients. I’m sick of driving but jump in my car regardless. Anything to get away from that breeze. I hope the rumbling of my car’s engine doesn’t wake my parents. My mom, especially, is a light sleeper. Thankfully, I don’t have to use the electric garage door opener. I urge my car out of the driveway on the tips of its tires. Although I’ve sometimes wondered about the usefulness of 24-hour grocery stores, tonight I’m thrilled they exist. One never knows when a desire for avocados will strike.
Light floods the vast, empty parking lot.
I stop as far from the entrance as possible and jog the distance from my car to the store as a form of penance that doubles as exercise.
The interior is an angelically lit as the exterior. Good lighting, I’ve read, encourages consumers, enhances colour and smooths over the pain of slightly higher prices. How could this store not be more expensive; look at all that lighting! It emanates from everywhere. The ceiling hangs so high above me I feel I’m on the bottom of a luminescent ocean. Wiggling my dorsal fin, I swim along to the vegetable section, where I bag four avocados, navigate to the freezers—bypassing, with lingering eyes, rows of ice cream buckets—and grab a package of frozen shrimp. I’m being helped along to the only open register by an air-conditioned current, when I spy a pharmacy counter. Pharma-smart. There wasn’t a pharmacy here before. The point leaves me so stunned I stop. How dare Quarterville change! I should have a monopoly on evolution. But if the pharmacy’s here, I might as well walk toward it. Behind the counter, a woman wearing a white coat is re-arranging plastic bottles on a shelf. Her back is to me. I watch her for a few seconds, enamoured with the flowing folds of her clothing, before clearing my throat. “Excuse me.”
She leaps.
Drops one of the pill bottles to the floor.
The pills scatter.
“I’m sorry,” we say at the same time.
I want to help her pick them up but I’m unable to get over the counter. I can’t hop across like a hockey player over the boards. So I freeze, feeling like an unhelpful prick.
She kneels down and starts cleaning up the mess, pill by pill.
“Vitamins,” she mumbles.
Then she lifts herself up, her legs and back stiffen, and she says, “Oh my god. Charlie?”
I squint. Yes, I’m Charlie. Who are you?
She says my full name, including my middle initial. I nod without recognition. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asks.
After taking what seems like the maximum time allotted for the question, I’m about to say I don’t, when I do remember. The long black hair, the dark eyes. “Miss Dahlia Esfahani,” I say, bowing. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“Not bad. After, what, eight years?”
“Something like that.”
During the uncomfortable silence that follows, I remind myself that Dahlia and I went to elementary and high school together. That’s thirteen years of our lives somewhat shared and I barely remember her face. It’s a miracle I remembered her name, but I’ve always been good with names. It’s why Winterson let me greet people. Memory coupled with a smile made fertile ground for business. Except, fuck Winterson & Partners. I don’t work there anymore. Fuck Dahlia, too? I extract the thought and drop it into my own empty pill bottle. The thought rattles. I might save it for later. If only to spite Rosie, I tell myself, as I stare at Dahlia and Dahlia stares at me, and her scattered pills remain spilled hazardously on the floor. We were never friends, but in a high school the size of ours you’re kind of friends with everyone by default. “So, you’re a pharmacist now,” I say.
She nods. “And you’re… here.” She notices my groceries. “For avocado and shrimp?”
“Omelettes.”
“Midnight craving. I see.”
“Or maybe I’m pregnant,” I say, and it comes out even lamer than I expected.
She pushes strands of her black hair behind her ears. They’re ears pretty enough for a Murakami novel. I hope I’m not being correspondingly weird.
“Do you maybe have a pill for that?”
“For being pregnant?”
I’m not sure what I was referring to, but I remember my reason for being here and say, “For truth-telling. Do you maybe have a pill for telling the truth. A serum of sorts…”
Hallelujah! She snorts like a startled piglet and starts to laugh. Surprised, I thank the heavenly light and hazy smell of pharmaceuticals. “You’re exactly like I remember you, Charlie, strange but funny. Remember Mister Brickman’s history class? You always made me laugh, even when I didn’t really get your jokes.”
“I doubt I got all of them myself.”
“The pills…” I point at them with my unshaven chin.
“Right.” She crouches, resuming her cleaning up. “But, seriously, do you need medication? Technically we close at midnight, but I could make an exception for an old friend.”
I say I don’t, showing off my avocados and shrimp. “Just this for me tonight.”
She drops the last spilled vitamin into the palm of her hand, uses the other to sweep the pills into the trash, then takes off her white coat, folds it over her arm and, stepping out from behind the counter says, “Listen, are you busy?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.” She checks her watch. “At one a.m. on an unspectacular Quartervillain Monday night.”
As she smiles, I recall her having braces in high school. Large, unseemly ones. But tonight her teeth are reflecting the ambient light and are almost as pretty as her ears. Straighter, in fact. Her ears are a little crooked. Maybe that’s why she’s always worn her hair long. I don’t dare ask.
“Or…” Her smile fades, replaced by signs of embarrassment: a lowered chin, expanding pools of pink below her cheeks. “Is there already someone on the other side of those omelettes?”
Pink cheeks are infectious. “No, the omelettes are for the morning.”
“For my parents,” I add.
“You’re visiting them? That is so cute.”
We walk to the register, I pay for my food, and we stand together before the automatic doors leading to the parking lot outside, just far enough away so that the doors don’t open. “There’s a fast food place downtown that stays open all night,” she says. “We could go there and talk. If you want.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I spy my Mazda at the very edge of the parking lot’s glow.
“I’d like that.”
Three more cars are parked closer, and a GMC pickup truck is idling along the cement sidewalk that runs parallel to the grocery store doors. It flashes its high beams.
“Should we take your car or mine?” I ask.
“I don’t have a car.”
“So,” I say, pretending to be offended, “this is all just an elaborate ruse to avoid paying for a cab home.”
“No comment.”
The pickup truck sounds its horn.
“Will you excuse me for a second?” Dahlia says.
And without waiting for an answer she steps toward the doors, which slide open, letting her past, then slide closed as she walks down the sidewalk toward the passenger side of the pickup truck. I watch her speak to the driver, whom I can’t see. I hear only the fact of conversation. It’s a brief one. The truck rolls up its passenger’s side window, coasts past the grocery store entrance—the parking lot lights allowing me to make out a silhouette in a baseball cap behind the wheel—and roars away from view.
I join Dahlia outside.
“Let’s go,” she says.
I look at the space vacated by pickup truck. “Are you sure?”
She carefully fixes the white coat hanging across her forearm. “I’m sure. And I know what you’re thinking, but that was not my boyfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend. Don’t worry, you’re not stepping on anyone’s toes.”
“And we’re not going on a date,” I say.
“Also correct.”
On our way to my car, she asks why I parked so far away. I tell her it’s for the exercise.
“I like walking,” she says. “Sometimes I go for a walk when I can’t sleep.”
“When I can’t sleep, I eat.”
“I guess that means we’re going to do a bit of both today.”
Using my keyless remote, I unlock the car doors. “That’s right. We will be literally not sleeping together.” Which surprises me, given I drove a thousand kilometres today and should be zombified by now.
She snorts again. Quieter this time, or maybe the acoustics in the grocery store were better. I toss the groceries in the back seat. We get in. “Your car is unbelievably clean,” she says.
My mom would be proud.
“Thanks.”
“Oh, come on. It was a compliment.”
I start the car. “I know. I said thanks. I like to keep a clean ride.” I also know what my facial expression must be, because I’m thinking that’s the least masculine, gayest thing to have: a neat car. I’d bet anything the inside of that GMC pickup would give my mom post-traumatic stress. Not that I’m competing with anyone. For anyone. I’m just an unrehabilitated law student, a hideous species of creature capable of booking study rooms in the library, not to use them but so no one else can use them, and keeping textbooks weeks past their due dates, gladly incurring inflated late fees, to min-max its chances of getting the lone A in a B-curve class. In other words, I’m always competing.
When Dahlia tries to tell me how to get to the fast food place, I politely cut her off. “I’m from around here, remember. You never forget your first town.”
“That was Kirk Loomis,” she says.
Hmm?
“In the truck, waiting to pick me up. That was Kirk Loomis.”
If the name’s supposed to tell me something, I fail to understand what. “Kirk Loomis who is not your boyfriend,” I say.
“That’s correct. You said you’re from around here, so I’m just letting you know.” Smirking, she checks her makeup in the rear-view mirror. “Buyer beware, all’s fair in love and war, and all that.”
“Caveat emptor.”
“What, you think a pharmacist doesn’t know Latin?”
“I don’t know Latin,” I say.
“Me neither, but I know caveat emptor, carpe diem because of The Dead Poet’s Society, veni, vidi, vici and maybe a few more.”
“Do you know buyer beware normally applies only to patent defects?”
“Now you lost me.”
“When you’re buying a house, for example, the buyer is the one responsible for seeing and knowing about all the patent, or visible, defects in the house, and it’s the seller’s responsible to disclose all the latent, hidden, ones. Rotting walls, haunted rooms, things like that.”
“Good thing I’m not a house, then.”
I wrack my brain for more teenage memories. Dahlia: getting her school picture taken (“Chin up, please. Look at the dot and smile—or, on second thought, let’s keep a straight face, kid.”), eating lunch with her friends (“Hey, Dee. What do you think about 9/11? Like, does your dad think the Americans deserved it?”), playing volleyball (“Call it, call it… Nice! Set… now spike the goddamn ball Esfahani!), waiting around for a ride after class, waiting for a long time, longer than anyone else—
“Missed it, Mister Quarterville.”
“What?” Oh, the fast food place. I do a three point turn on the deserted street. “So what exactly am I buying?”
“Burgers, fries, obscenely sugary local soda. The usual after hours meal.”
“After Hours, good movie,” I say, parking.
“Never saw it.”
I want to know who the hell Kirk Loomis is. “It’s from nineteen eighty-five. A little before your time, I’m afraid.”
“We’re the same age.”
“I never said we weren’t.” Sliding out of the car, I catch a glimpse of my groceries lying on the back seat. “Hey, what about my shrimps? They’ll melt.”
“First, it’s thaw—if you’re being precise. Second, give them to me.”
I hand the package over and we go inside. Although I haven’t been in here in years, nothing’s changed, and that’s the way I like my home towns. I order for the both of us, put our food on a single tray and carry the tray to the booth with the stickiest plastic seats I can find. I swear they’re made from hardened glue. Touching them with my finger, I’m hit by nostalgia for the second time tonight. Meanwhile, Dahlia’s still at the front. “Anything else, Miss E?” our teenage waiter asks her. She slaps my shrimp down on the counter. “Yeah, put these in the freezer for me, Sven.”
“No problem.”
“There.” Dahlia plops down across from me. “I told you I’d take care of the shrimp problem.”
“‘Miss E’?” I ask.
She takes a bite of her burger. Mayonnaise threatens to run down her chin, but she wipes it away with the back of her hand. “In my spare time, I coach volleyball, basketball and soccer at the high school.”
“At our high school? Wow, it’s like you never left.”
I bite my tongue only after realising that might sound offensive. I didn’t mean it that way, I was merely voicing an observation, but observations can also hurt. Thankfully, she seems amused. “I left and I came back. And you, Charlie, you came back too.”
“For omelettes.”
She pulls out her phone. “Quartervillains through and through.”
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Looking up that movie you mentioned.”
“On Wikipedia?”
“On the friggin’ Pirate Bay, you big dork. I don’t want to read about it. I want to download it, and Sven’s kindly given me access to the corporate high speed internet.” She turns and yells, “Thanks, Sven!”
“No problem, Miss E.”
She keeps scrolling down her screen. “Wait,” I say, “so you coach guys’ sports?”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century.” She looks up. “Seriously, though, I get enough of that from the locals. One of the reasons I brought you here to talk…” But her attention drifts back to her phone screen, and I hear the cuckoo clock soundtrack to After Hours start to play.
“You downloaded it already?”
“No, it’s just a clip. ‘Great Movie Scenes - After Hours’. I want a preview before I invest Sven’s boss’ bandwidth in getting the whole thing.”
She puts the phone on the table so I can see too. In the movie, Griffin Dunne is sitting in a restaurant booth across from Patricia Arquette. We see them from the side. He leans over and says, “Can I ask you something? I’ve wanted to ask you this all night. Who’s Franklin?” She says, “Franklin?” Then there’s a cut, we see her from the front, and she continues, “Franklin is my husband.” We cut back to Griffin Dunne, also seen from the front: “Really?”
“Surrender Dorothy,” I say.
“That must be one of those Latin phrases I don’t know.”
“You’ll know it once you watch the movie.”
The scene continues.
“Where’d you find the clip?” I ask.
She pauses the video and that’s when I notice what app she’s using: the YouTube app. My fingers scramble away from my burger and tap at the screen, resuming the video (“…particularly obsessed with…”), pausing the video, navigating away from this app to something else, anything else. My blood pressure is more than elevated. However irrational it is, I’m gripped by the fear that she’ll find my video on there. It’ll pop up at the end as a suggested viewing. Great Movie Scenes - Charlie Fucks Up His Life.
“Charlie?”
I force my facial features into the flesh equivalent of a smiley. “Yeah? I… didn’t want to ruin the movie for you. There was a vital plot point coming up in the dialogue.” Inside my head, gears are spinning. Words on ticker tape are streaming by. There are millions of videos on YouTube, the words spell out; she’ll never find the obscure one of you that nobody cares about.
“How sweet of you.”
Craning her neck toward Sven, she yells, “Sven, you ever see a movie called After Hours?”
He replies without turning around. He just thrusts his arms into the air and howls, “Martin Scorsese, baby!”
The kids are alright, I think.
Then, returning my fingers to my burger, I change the subject. “Before, you were mentioning a reason for bringing me here to talk. And I use that tense on purpose, because you didn’t finish.”
“You want spoilers.”
“I do.”
She sips her drink noisily through a straw. “It’s kind of a contradiction.”
“This time I don’t follow the Latin.”
“My reason is kind of a contradiction, a paradox. I asked you here because I know you and at the same time I don’t know you. Your face, your voice, the way you move, they’re familiar. I saw them five days a week for years. But that was itself years ago. You’re not the same person you were. But you are the same person. Do you follow so far?”
Oddly, I do. “Keep going.”
“And, lately, I’ve been really struggling with a choice I have to make. What the choice is doesn’t matter. What matters is that I need someone to talk about it with, but I can’t talk to anyone I know, because I know them, and I can’t talk to a stranger, because I can’t talk to a stranger about it.”
“So you looked up from your vitamins, saw me…”
“It’s selfish.”
“I’m having a good time, actually.”
“Me, too.”
I finish my burger. My mouth tastes as sticky as my seat feels, but that’s part of the appeal. “Do you know what else is a paradox? ‘This sentence is false’.”
She snorts. “I’ve heard that one before but I like your delivery.”
“Good. Now stretch, loosen up and take advantage of me as a stranger who’s not a stranger.”
“I won’t sleep with you,” she says.
“I know.”
“Yet you still want to help me make my choice?”
“If I can, sure.”
We’re thrust into silence as she runs out of soda to drink through her straw. She munches on fries instead. I eat a few of mine too. “I think that’s a problem for me,” she says.
“What is?”
“The fact you want to help.”
“That sounds like another paradox.”
“No, still the same one, but because you want to help it means you’re not a stranger anymore. I feel like I know you too much.” She shakes her head. “I can’t explain it very well. Have you ever wanted to tell someone something, truly wanted it, only to suddenly realise you can’t do it. Not because of a physical limitation, but—”
“But because there’s an imaginary wet cloth wrapped around your voice box. Like you made up your mind, chose the right series of words, and when you want to speak them the very idea of the cloth makes you gurgle phantom gibberish no one else can hear.”
“Surrender friggin’ Dorothy.”
I believe I’ve just made sense without making sense, and that makes me blush. I feel warm. Not hot, like a blowtorch to the cheeks, but warm, like rays of sunlight on your skin, or sleeping under a down comforter in your favourite bed in the dead of winter. “I got fired from my job,” I say. “Yesterday morning. I’m not visiting my parents, at least not in any normal sense. The day before that, I got my heart broken. I drove for twelve hours today to get here because I’ve nowhere else to go and I hated more than anything the thought of being alone.”
I’m sure I said that way too quickly. I take a fry. Crunch.
Dahlia’s face is marble. I want to chisel it away to reveal a reaction. “And you looked up from your avocado and frozen shrimp, and there I was,” she says.
“And here we are, both looking up from an after hours meal, and I believe I’ve gone ahead and stolen your thunder.”
“Bolt and lightning, very, very frightening.”
“So talk about selfish,” I say.
“I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me? This time I was the one about to apologise—when you quoted Bohemian Rhapsody at me. That threw me off. But don’t think I can’t do the same.” My Freddie Mercury is indecent, but I give it a shot. “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”
“This is real life, Charlie, and I’m sorry for repeating song lyrics when I don’t know what else to say, and I’m sorry for assuming that I was the only one with a reason for wanting to talk to a stranger who’s not a stranger.”
Neither of us knows what to say next. We peck at what’s left of our food while Sven wipes down the surfaces of nearby tables. Intermittently, he sprays lemon-scented disinfectant. The smell persists in the air like an autumn morning fog. “I’m sorry about your job and your heart,” Dahlia says. “I’m sorry, too, that it makes me happy you’re not just visiting but staying kind of indefinitely. I wish I could wrap your heart in chocolate. What kind of work do you do?”
I’ve never had my heart wrapped in chocolate. “You’re strange,” I say.
“Usually I filter stuff like that out.”
This time she snuck it in. I tell her I was a lawyer. She doesn’t ask why I got fired. When she asks if I still want to be a lawyer, I say I don’t know.
“I doubt there’s much legal work around here anyway,” she says.
I say, “Are you sticking to your guns about not wanting to talk to me about your choice?”
“Take it as a compliment.”
“Fair enough. So who’s Kirk Loomis?”
“I would tell you,” she says, painting her plate with mustard, “but now that you told me you’re a lawyer, I feel like this is a trick of yours. You ask a question, don’t get an answer, pretend you’ve forgotten, then bring it up again when the other person’s not expecting it.”
“That is a technique of legal questioning,” I admit.
“So I’ll leave you hanging.” She checks her phone. “Because it’s late, because you need to go to sleep, and because I want to see you again.”
“How do you know I need sleep?”
She gets up. “That must be a technique too, responding to a minor point while ignoring the major one.” She yells at Sven, “Our shrimp, please.” Back to me, while walking to get them: “I know you’re tired because those eyes you’re making at me are the colour of the ketchup on your shirt.”
I wipe the ketchup off with a napkin, but a small stain remains. The shrimp, when she hands them to me, nearly give me frostbite. I juggle the package all the way to the car and deposit it in the back seat. The avocados seem glad to have their companion back.
“The movie finished downloading,” Dahlia says.
If she could see that my eyes are the colour of ketchup, I can see that her mood has turned the colour of fried onions. I give her a ride home, during which we don’t say a thing. Once in a while she gives me directions to follow. She lives in a house in a part of Quarterville that didn’t exist when we went to high school together. Getting out, she says, “Thirteen years is a long time to know someone, even if you never knew them very well. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I would.”
My time spent with Rosie seems insignificant in comparison, and I wonder how much a heart breaks after a relationship spanning decades. That kind of pain is unimaginable. I hesitate before asking, “Did I say something to make you sad?”
Dahlia stops on her lawn, between my car and her front door.
I’m in a bizarre space. I want to sleep with her but I also want her to be happy. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” I add out of politeness.
She returns to the car, I roll down the window and she leans inside. “You’re telling me I have a right to remain silent?”
“Yes.”
“So I’ll exercise that right.”
“You know, just because I’m a lawyer doesn’t mean you have to talk to me like one.”
I at least get a smile for that. A melancholy one, but beggars can’t be choosers; I nearly gag on the cliche. Dahlia’s right. If that’s the best my head can come up with, I am tired. “I’m happy we bumped into each other, Charlie. I’m not saying it’s fate or anything, but it was good for me. I mean what I said about wanting to see you again. Stop by the pharmacy sometime after midnight. But at the same time, talking to you made me scared. Don’t worry. It’s nothing you did. I’m not scared of you. I’m scared of not having what you have. And I know it probably doesn’t feel like it to you now, but you went through a tough time and you’re here because you were elsewhere and had Quarterville to come back to. You fell, but you fell onto pillows. As falls go, that’s pretty good. The choice I have to make, I have to make it here. If I screw up, I have no other home. If I jump and I fall, there’ll be nothing to cushion the impact.”
Words are inadequate, but: “If there’s any way I can help…”
“After Hours,” she says.
And goes inside.
I idle by her curb for a few minutes, mulling her words over, but I realise she can see me through the window and I don’t want to seem like a creep, so I drive. I take the long way home. Navigating the quiet streets, I think about life, omelettes and admitting to being fired. On one hand, the admission is easy. I already made it to Frank Delaney and Dahlia. On the other, I wasn’t afraid of the consequences of either of them considering me a failure. If they did, oh well. The opinion of my parents actually matters to me. It may not be equivalent to my self-esteem, but the two are like intertwined strands of DNA. I travel in circles, passing the same streets and houses over and over. I’m stuck in a loop—and the thing that rips me out of it is Kirk Loomis. The stinging low beam headlights of his GMC pickup truck reflect off my rear-view mirror: have been reflecting off my rear-view mirror for some time. He’s following me. I turn, he turns. I speed up, he speeds up. I consider slowing down or stopping, but a confrontation is not what I’m looking for, especially not in my state of mind and over something I don’t understand. I also don’t want to lead him to my parents’ home, but finally I decide he probably knows where they live anyway, so I pull in the driveway, stop and cut the engine. His truck stays on the street. I get out of my vehicle. He doesn’t get out of out his. Avoiding eye contact, I enter the house through the front door.
I walk quietly to the kitchen where, without turning on the lights, I slouch into the kitchen chair from whose vantage point I have the best view of the street. The room is dark. The softly moving image hardens into a photograph.
I’m nudged awake.
I force open heavy-lidded eyes sticky with sleep.
My dad pokes me again. He’s dressed in his work clothes. “Morning,” he says. He’s standing sideways, so I lift my head off the kitchen table. I rub my face. The entire left side is numb. In a hoarse voice, I ask what time it is.
“Almost time for us to go.”
The curtains in the kitchen are drawn. I can’t see outside, just the dull glow of whatever light the material fails to catch.
“We were going to let you sleep, but decided you’d be better off doing that in your own bed.”
“Omelettes,” I say.
“Make whatever you like,” my mom answers from the garage.
They leave, I open the curtains. The street is empty. Kirk Loomis’ GMC pickup truck is gone. The night has given way to a new day that hurts my already squinting eyes, and I begin to beat myself up over falling asleep. My plan of making breakfast to smooth over the delivery of unpleasant news is kaput, but I decide to make omelettes anyway. No more sleep for me, plus a dry run is a good idea when dealing with a new recipe. But when I look in the fridge, neither the avocados nor shrimp are there. I must have left them in the car. I rush outside, open the Mazda’s door, and smell thawed shrimp even before I see them stewing in a puddle on the back seat. I save the avocados, throw the shrimp in the garbage, and wash the car seat with soap and warm water. While I’m at it, I attempt a better job on the ketchup stain on my shirt. Though unsuccessful, I’m nevertheless cheered by the stain’s existence. I enjoyed my late night with Dahlia. I think about calling her, but assume she’s likely still sleeping. I also don’t have her number. Or her email. Or any means of reaching her short of driving to the pharmacy, tucked safely away in its well lit grocery store cocoon. Of course, Dahlia’s existence also confirms the existence of Kirk Loomis, whose as of yet unknown face encourages me to scrub the back seat harder.
When I’m done, I make avocado omelettes and eat them on my parents’ backyard deck because the deck wasn’t there when I was a kid and I don’t want to feel like I’ve travelled into the past.
After eating, I shower and take a nap.
I awake in the afternoon, less groggy this time and with a pleasant sharpness of mind that wasn’t there before. I take it as a sign of sufficient restfulness. On my tablet, I start a new to-do list and populate it with mundane tasks, such as buying clothes, setting an exercise program and creating a C.V. To help with the latter, I browse badly written online articles filled with contradictory hints: use colours, use only black and white; use fancy fonts, use only 12-point Times New Roman; be creative, follow the rules; be clear and efficient, use meaningless numbers and plenty of newspeak: you’re not a lawyer, you’re a legal content creation and corporate client management specialist! I stop and add a final task to my list: “tell parents got fired”. I also decide to search for a new skill to learn, something to make me valuable to employers in the twenty-first century, something like learning Chinese, Python or basic Photoshop skills. I could also volunteer to help others. Employers love people with a history of working for free. They also love to equate their own business interests with human kindness.
I note the time, set a few browser bookmarks and decide to make dinner for my parents. They eat early by North American standards, as soon as they finish their day shift, and I hope to accomplish with a meal of turkey breast cutlets, baked potatoes and sauerkraut what I failed to accomplish with shrimp and avocado omelettes.
Cooking in my parents’ kitchen reminds me of cooking for Rosie, so I put on music to keep my mind in an occupied state that prefers daydreams of Dahlia to retrospectively painful memories.
I finish making dinner with plenty of time to spare.
Glancing at my watch, I step carefully into my old bedroom to pick out a set of fresh clothes, mindful not to disturb any lingering ghosts of my past existence. I would prefer to keep this me and that me as divided as postwar Berlin, despite what I know are the loving but opposing intentions of my parents, who want their only child back. I also know I am the Soviet Union in this Cold War metaphor. I try on a few pairs of pants before finding a pair that fits, to which I add a snug undershirt and—consciously avoiding the colour red—a striped green shirt with a stiff collar. “I lost my job,” I say to the room.
“I got fired,” I try again, louder.
Easy enough.
But when I hear the garage door open and moments later see my parents enter the house through the side garage door, dressed in matching work uniforms and smiles on their faces, shining smiles directed at me, that ease is no longer to be found.
“Hi,” I say.
My mom sniffs at the air. “Beaver, you made dinner,” she responds.
“Hello, son,” my dad says.
I keep the food warm until they’re ready, then set out three plates, knives and forks, and divide the meal into three more or less equal portions. My dad, who is about twice my mom’s width, eats the same amount as she does without changing that proportion, making my mom’s metabolism an obvious wonder of nature. Unfortunately for me, she didn’t pass that wonder down in her genes. I’m wide, too. In revenge, and while hiding behind the refrigerator, I transfer some of my potatoes and sauerkraut from my plate to hers. The cutlet is more difficult to divide so I make sure she has the largest one. Finally, I pour three cups of tea and take my seat at the table. When my parents sit, we eat.
The food is good, which means I eat too quickly, barely chewing, swallowing large chunks and finishing dinner first. Between bites, my parents take turns looking up at me and smiling. Because my plate is empty, I have no choice but to notice and smile back. Should I say I got fired or was fired, or does that even matter? Every detail matters. “We’re so glad you’re visiting,” my dad says with his mouth full. He eats quickly, too. He finishes second, crossing the finish line by downing all of his tea at once. My mom takes the bronze medal, and I take both their plates and bring them to the sink to wash them. We don’t eat in the dining room; we eat in the kitchen. We don’t have a dishwasher; we use our hands. Because that’s how it was done in the old country. With my back to my parents, freed momentarily from their glowing faces, I settle on was fired because it sounds less harsh.
I dry my hands on a rag and turn to face the kitchen table.
“I have something to tell you guys,” I say.
Their ears prick up.
But I hesitate, and before any words escape my throat, there’s a knock on the door and my dad gets up to answer it. I hear the front door open, the exchange of niceties, and the door close. My dad returns holding a white envelope. “From the town,” he says, raising the envelope above his head, then uses his finger to open it. He removes a single, hastily folded piece of paper. He reads it. His expression changes from one communicating the satisfaction of having just finished a hard earned dinner to one of concern bordering on rage. Creases invade his forehead. “Motherfuckers,” he says in Polish, and hands the letter to me.
I scan it.
It’s a letter indicating that my parents failed to receive a building permit before building their backyard deck and, consequently, can either pay a fine of $10,000 or demolish the “illegal construction.” That’s harsh. However, it’s the name at the bottom of the letter, printed below an ornately scrawled signature, that most catches my interest—by which I mean I nearly choke on it. Kirk Loomis.
“What is it?” my mom asks.
“Those bastards can’t do this,” my dad says.
“You didn’t get a building permit for the deck you built and now the municipality wants you to pay $10,000 or take the deck apart,” I tell my mom, before asking my dad, “Did you apply for a permit?”
“Of course not. It’s a deck. Those motherfucking bastards. No one applies for a building permit to put up a deck.”
That may be true, but it’s still a problem if the law requires one. The bigger problem is that I’ve been in Quarterville for a day and I’m already causing my parents a headache. As if I wasn’t enough of a fuck up. That it’s not my fault is of little consolation to me, none to them, and inconsequential for their nerves and wallets. “I’ll see if I can take care of it,” I say.
“How?” my mom asks.
“Think you can get them to reconsider?” my dad asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “But tell me, who’s Kirk Loomis?”
My dad slumps into his chair, shaking his head, lips trembling and vocal chords on the verge of growling, and slaps the kitchen table. “The god damn mayor.”
“Isn’t it unusual for the mayor to be sending out letters like this?” my mom asks.
It definitely is, unless you happen to suspect the real reason he’s doing it. Still, something doesn’t jibe. I can’t square the image of the silhouette in the GMC pickup truck with the fact that Kirk Loomis is the mayor of Quarterville. Maybe it’s the baseball cap on his head or his behaviour, but something doesn’t seem mayoral. I don’t harbour any illusions about politicians, even small town ones, being decent people, but they’re usually not stupid enough to risk their careers on romance. Then again, sex is the common male denominator, power is an aphrodisiac, and it’s certainly possible Kirk Loomis is trying to score with a younger woman. “I don’t know. I’ll find out,” I say. “Give me a few days and, most importantly, don’t try to do anything about this yourselves.”
“Oh, Beaver,” my mom says. “You visit us and right away something like this crops up. What horrible luck. You really don’t have to deal with it. We can deal with it ourselves, and if worse does come to worst we can always just pay the money.”
“We’re not paying shit,” my dad says.
“Let me look into it,” I say.
My dad’s face softens. “I guess that’s the value of having a lawyer in the family.” But his eyes remain daggers. “The bastards don’t know who they’re dealing with. They think they can scare us into paying up, pocket a little extra cash—as if our taxes weren’t high enough—but we’ll show them we can’t be scared.”
“And we do have the money, Beaver, so don’t worry.”
“Money they’ll never touch! Even if it means having to rip every last nail out of every last board of that deck with my own bloody fingers.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” I say. “In most cases, it doesn’t.”
My mom pats me on the shoulder. “We’re so proud of you for everything you’ve accomplished so far in your life. Both of us are. Maybe we don’t tell you that often enough. You’re a good son to us.”
“You’re good at everything you put your mind to,” my dad adds.
I feel horrible. “Thanks.”
My mom hugs me. “But before we were interrupted, there was something you wanted to tell us…”
How can I tell them now? “Nothing important,” I say.
I get another pat from my mom. “Well, that’s enough stress for one afternoon. I’ll make us coffee and your dad will bring some cookies from the pantry.” When my dad doesn’t react, she repeats the last part more slowly. My mom is an expert at indirect commands, and as my dad obediently descends the stairs, I think about the elusive nature of power and the mysterious ways in which it’s wielded. I also think about Kirk Loomis. I need to find him so that I can set the record straight. His jealousy is misguided. I don’t want to sleep with Dahlia and Dahlia doesn’t want to sleep with me. The truth is simplicity itself. The truth shall set my parents’ deck free.
After coffee, I slide the letter from the town into my pants pocket and drive to the Quarterville municipal office. As I pull open the doors to the flat-roofed, brown brick building–
“We’re closed,” a woman says.
She’s leaning on a long, empty desk, trying to maneuver her foot into a loafer.
I glance at the clock in the corner. It says 3:52 in digital numerals.
“The door was open. What time do you close?”
“Four o’clock.” She grunts.
“It’s three fifty-two,” I say.
She stands up straight, bangs her heel on the floor a few times and gives me the kind of disinterestedly passive aggressive look that’s the domain of goverment workers everywhere. The message is clear: it doesn’t matter how badly or slowly they do their jobs, because you can’t go anywhere else. “What can I do you for?”
“I’d like to see the mayor, Kirk Loomis.”
She motions at the empty office. “He ain’t here.”
“Will he be here tomorrow?”
“What do you want to see him for?”
It’s funny how my reason is related to his presence, but I don’t mention it. I take out the letter instead. “I’d like to discuss a decision of his.”
“You can attend a council meeting and bring it up there during question time,” she says.
Question time sounds like the last phase of an elementary school show and tell. “It’s more of a municipal planning decision than a policy one. It has to do with a private building permit.”
“Building permit? I’m afraid the mayor doesn’t deal in those, hun.”
I hand her the letter. She glances at it lazily. When she’s done, she raises her head and does the same to me. “You ain’t Mister E.”
“I’m not. I’m his agent,” I say. “But that is Mister Loomis’ signature, is it not?”
“Seems to be.” The clock strikes closing time, making the clerk cringe. I wonder when she was here last at four o’clock. “An agent of what kind? Like a real estate agent?”
“A legal representative.”
The word legal pricks her. She clears her throat, produces a pair of reading glasses, plants them on her nose and reads the letter again, more carefully this time. “So the problem with this deck is…”
I don’t fill in the blank. “Do you have the authority to make decisions regarding building permits?”
“No…”
“In which case, please put me in contact with the mayor or someone who does have that power.”
“It’s very odd for the mayor to be making these kinds of decisions.”
We agree on that point. “But he did.”
I take the letter back from her, gently ripping it from her hands, and this time I make a show of the empty office and the clock. “I don’t want to keep you too long after hours,” I say, “but if you could get me the mayor’s contact information—a phone number, an email—I would greatly appreciate it.”
“He has a personal secretary.”
“That’ll do.”
She scribbles a phone number on a post-it note. As I’m taking it from her, “The secretary’s in Cuba for the time being,” she says.
“Thanks.”
I try not to sound sarcastic and she tries not to care. “What did you say your name was, hun?”
“I didn’t.”
There’s nothing more for me to learn here, so I leave. She follows me out the door, locking it behind her, and watches as I get into my car and drive off. If this were a spy movie, I’d double back and follow her to whomever she reports; but this is real life, and she’s likely going straight home to have a bite to eat, watch TV and whine about her day to her husband and kids. The distaste I feel for the whole episode makes me wonder if I’ve already become one of those urbane city people whose personal bitterness manifests itself from behind a web of self-professed liberal tolerance as an arrogant dislike for an imagined other called a country bumpkin. The truth is, if I had a job, a wife and kids and didn’t eat dinner early in the eastern European fashion, I’d be going straight home to have a bite to eat, watch TV and whine about my day, too. In the city, I watched the same shows and ate the same ready-made meals. Mass media has either made the bumpkin extinct or made him ubiquitous. High speed internet, instant information, one big, international yokel area network…
I almost run a stop sign.
Slamming the brake at the last second, my seat belt strains against my shoulder, and I skid to a noisy halt.
But no cars whiz by ahead and no police cruiser lurks nearby. It’s an uneventful, small town intersection and the peace here is difficult to disturb. Running the sign wouldn’t have made a difference to anyone. I’m not even delayed by not running it, because I’ve nowhere concrete to go. I accelerate slowly and smoothly, like my dad taught me, and return to the practical business at hand: the letter, and finding Kirk Loomis to discuss it with.
At the next empty intersection, I stop without pulling off the road and dial the secretary’s number from the post-it note. Not unexpectedly, I get her voice mail.
If I knew Dahlia’s number, I could try asking her for Kirk Loomis’ whereabouts, but I don’t know it, and I’d rather leave her out of the quarrel as much as possible. Above all else, I don’t want to embarrass her. Plus, the thought of an aging politician wooing her gives me the creeps, despite my staunch belief that consenting adults are free to do together in private whatever they please. I do know where Dahlia lives, but dropping by this afternoon would make me into a creep, so I ignore that option. If all else fails, I’ll show up at the grocery store pharmacy again. She did invite me, and I would like to see her again. However, my immediate plan is the phone book: online, of course, because only old people still rely on paper. Still standing at the intersection, I navigate to the website on my tablet and perform a search. No “Kirk Loomis” shows up, but there is another Loomis: Aspen. I save her number and copy-and-paste her address into Google Maps. It shows up at the end of a cul-de-sac in a brand new subdivision conveniently located just outside Quarterville’s city limits, undoubtedly for tax reasons. Because that sounds like a rich people trick, I figure it can’t hurt to go sightseeing. Mayors are known to be rich, and what else but money would convince someone to give their kid a name as pretentious as Aspen?
Finally a car pulls up behind me. The driver honks, and I’m only too happy to get moving again.
I follow the tablet’s robotic directions.
“Left turn in one hundred metres.”
I leave the voice prompts on despite knowing where I’m going.
The streets begin to fill up. Workers are coming home. I’ve been home all day, mostly sleeping off disappoinment and a long drive. They’re pulling into grey asphalt driveways leading to vinyl sided houses, and I’ve just pulled out of mine. But it wasn’t even mine. It doesn’t lead to my house. It leads to my parents’ house. For whom I had the decency to make dinner. They seemed to enjoy the food. At least I did that. I helped them out. I might be able to handle being an arrogant prick, a deadbeat son and a bum, but not all at once. I’m not built for so much uselessness. My phone rings.
I pick up.
“Good afternoon, Charlie. It’s Amanda from Winterson and Partners. Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” I say, trying to predict what she wants, while images from my YouTube video parade through my head. Maybe I left something at the office. Maybe I could issue a DMCA complaint to have the video taken down. “There’s two things, really,” Amanda says. I hear her over a background of Rosie’s slurred, sensual, drunken voice. One is in my head and the other in my ear, but they’re both equally real. The former may be giving me an erection. That’s real, too. The past, in which I was aroused, is as real as the present, in which I am aroused. Only the future, in which I may become aroused, is special, although even physicists struggle to explain why. In most equations purporting to describe reality, time has no direction. It can be positive or negative and the equation works. This has led scientists to search for time’s so-called arrow another way: by relying on entropy, which states that in a closed system things become increasingly disordered. This means time flows in the direction of the unfolding of chaos. How do I know that today is after yesterday? Because yesterday I was a working lawyer at Winterson’s, and today I’m not. We are all progressively cracked eggs. “Charlie?”
“Yes?”
“Good, you’re still here. I thought I’d lost you.”
“Sorry,” I mumble. “I’m driving.”
“That’s fine. Just listen. First, there’s a package here for you. It’s from Finland, it’s moderately heavy and it smells like perfume. Second, Mister Winterson wanted me to let you know you that he’s filled out and filed with the Law Society all the requisite paperwork dealing with the termination of your employment, so you’ll likely be hearing from one of their investigators soon.” Her voice sweetens. “Also, how are you holding up?”
The fucking bath soaps. “You can throw that package in the trash. Or, better yet, burn it.” But the Law Society? That’s the Bar, the licensing and regulatory body for all barristers and solicitors, i.e. lawyers, in the province. It’s the Law Society that sets the rules about how lawyers should act, both in and outside of practice, and makes sure that only properly trained, capable people can practise law, i.e. maintains and guards a lucrative monopoly on the provision of legal services. Why would I be hearing from one of their investigators? “The Law Society?”
“You were fired for cause, Charlie.”
She’s right. Winterson gave me the chance to quit, and I didn’t. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“The good character requirement,” Amanda says. “Remember that checklist you filled out before being called to the Bar? You swore you didn’t have a criminal record, et cetera. One of the facts you swore to was never being fired for cause. Well, now you have been. You have to update the Law Society about that, uncheck that box.” She’s right again. It’s every lawyer’s duty to keep the Law Society up to date about his or her transgressions. If you get caught selling drugs, soliciting a prostitute or turning right on a red light in Montreal, you have to let them know. Since yesterday, in the eyes of the Law Society I am a lawyer of dubious moral fibre. “It’s nothing, just a formality, but we do have to make the report and you do have to inform them. You’ll get a chance to explain the situation.”
“Turn right in one hundred and fifty metres,” my tablet says.
“Sorry?” Amanda says.
“Sorry, that was my GPS,” I say.
“Right, so before you turn, how about answering my question, Charlie. How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Thanks for telling me about the package. It’s Finnish bath soap. Like I said, get the janitor to toss the whole thing in the garbage, preferably in the big bin behind the building. And thank you for the heads up about the Law Society.” I’m almost certain Amanda called me on her own initiative. To Winterson, I’m as gone as yesterday’s newspaper, useful only for wrapping cheap maritime fish and chips. “I appreciate it.” Ending the call, I make my turn.
The subdivision I enter is new. I don’t remember its existence. The houses are large, brick and set far apart from each other, and the wide streets have quaintly eco-friendly names blurring together a contemporary love of all things natural and green with a timeless conservative yearning for a return to a simple, imaginary past. I assume it’s not just bonafide Quartervillains who live here but also people of means from the surrounding larger cities. In the past, after all, we were all gentlemen farmers. As they say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“Destination in one hundred metres,” my tablet says.
I slow down, paying attention to the odd numbered houses on the left. Number Seventeen belongs to the phone number of Aspen Loomis.
Number Seventeen is also an Alfred Hitchcock film about a gang of thieves.
When I see the number engraved on a boulder incorporated into a rock and flower garden, I pull up to the curb and stop. I cut the engine. I sit, my head turned to the left, and look. Perhaps I should be composing what I’m about to say to Kirk Loomis, but I’m not. I feel confident enough to wing it. I’ve winged it before with sophisticated clients and in front of trial-hardened lawyers, so a small town politico doesn’t elicit even a single nervous tick. In the rear view mirror, I appear as calm as I feel. I fix my hair. And the house, for all its pretensions to class, is just like all the other new houses built in North America: made essentially of foam and paper. It used to be that buildings were more solid than people, but not anymore. Between drywall and bone, I’d bet on bone, and for all the talk about glass houses, at least those come with a view. I exit my car and cross the street. The letter from Kirk Loomis to my parents is the pocket full of stones I’m ready to throw.
I ring the doorbell.
For twenty seconds there’s no answer. It gives me time to stew. Then the door opens, but the person standing on the other side is not the one I was expecting. “Hello, can I help you?” the red-headed young woman says.
I take my hand out of my pocket. “I’m here to see Kirk Loomis.”
I’ve always considered myself above love at first sight, and even instant infatuation, but as I watch the woman smile before she answers I realise that I’m still not above people—women—sometimes making a good impression on me. In fact, I’ve been attracted to both women I’ve met in Quarterville since I arrived, Dahlia and now:
“Aspen.”
I’m a little ashamed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch…”
She opens the door fully and leans against the frame. Because I don’t want to stare at her, I stare behind her instead, where I make out a golden chandelier flanked by twin staircases. “I said I’m Aspen Loomis. But I’m afraid neither Kirk Loomis is here at the moment,” she says.
“There’s more than one?”
“Kirk Loomis? Yes, my brother and my father. Which is it you want to talk to?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. So much for winging it, and I’m not even speaking to a Kirk Loomis yet. “It’s about a building permit issue.” I take out the letter, which is damp from my suddenly sweating palms, and show her the signature. “I was told Kirk Loomis is the mayor of Quarterville.”
“That would be my dad, Kirk Loomis Senior.”
“Do you have a way for me to reach him? I apologize for calling at your home, but the matter is somewhat urgent.” I hope my elevated tone will keep me from appearing unprofessional, but after just those two sentences I know all I’ve succeeded at is making myself sound as superficial and pompous as the rich people I imagine live around here. Aspen doesn’t seem superficial or pompous at all.
“I’m afraid not. He’s in Cuba. He won’t be back until Thursday.”
I don’t want to pry, but, “How long has he been in Cuba?” I ask, because older men on Cuban vacations with their secretaries are less likely to be driving pickup trucks in Ontario than those men’s sons.
“That’s not really your business now, is it?” she says, with a confidence artfully devoid of sarcasm.
I clear my throat in response. “It’s not. I apologize once more.”
“You know, you never told me your name, and I’ve never seen you around here before. The whole time you were sitting in your car on the other side of the street there, I was trying to guess who you might be. A reporter? A government official? Then when you walked up the driveway I saw your face, and I knew you couldn’t be either of those. You rung the doorbell, I thought about not answering…”
“And yet you answered.”
“Because you don’t have a dangerous face.” That could be a compliment or a sleight. The conversation turns non-verbal, before she continues, “So this is the part where you tell me your name.”
“Charlie E—,” I say. “My parents have lived in Quarterville for twenty-five years. I’m acting on this letter on their behalf.”
“I suppose I’ll believe you.”
“And if you didn’t?”
“If I didn’t, I’d have called the police.”
And now we’re back in my territory: the law. I regain my swagger. “Really? Was I committing a crime by being on a public road or politely ringing your doorbell?”
“There was an unidentified man sitting in a rather cheap car across from my home. I didn’t know why he was there, and every tick of the clock that he stayed made me feel more and more uncomfortable,” she says, playing the ditz.
“Thankfully, the law prefers to go by actions, not reactions.”
“Thankfully. But the police response time to this neighbourhood is surprisingly quick.”
“Do you call them often?”
“No,” she says, and steps away from the door frame, blocking my view of the sparkling chandelier. “By the way, the signature on that letter you have, it’s not my father’s. Or—how should I put this? It’s merely a good approximation.” She flashes a cobra’s smile. “My brother’s approximation. Have a good afternoon, Charlie E—.”
“Wait,” I call out as she’s closing the door.
It remains a quarter open. “Yes?” she asks sweetly, in ditz-mode again.
“Why would you tell me that? It’s not any of my business, either. You’re suggesting your brother forged a signature on an official municipal document.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that. As for why I told you, maybe I’m lying. Or maybe it’s my business to tell you.”
“Do you know where I can find your brother?”
“He owns the hardware store down by the highway. He’s usually there till five thirty on weekdays.”
There’s only one hardware store by the highway, and that can’t be what she means. “Benson’s General Hardware?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Don’t the Bensons own that?”
“One died, the other sold it and left town. One more thing. Lawyer?”
The door remains only a quarter open. “Excuse me?”
“That’s my third guess. After reporter and government official. After talking to you, I noticed you smell a little too much like black leather shoes and ambulances.”
“That’s rude,” I say.
“So is showing up at someone’s family home on business, but sometimes being rude doesn’t preclude being right. So am I?”
“I’m a lawyer by education.”
“That that’s how they all happen, isn’t it?”
I’m about to say she asks too many questions but realise the irony. “It is. Thank you for your help.”
“You’re welcome.”
The door closes the final quarter of its way, and as I cross the street back to my cheap car, I can’t help but be impressed by Aspen Loomis. I think I’m starting to develop a type, and it’s not one conducive to my long term happiness. Driving to Benson’s General Hardware, I bemoan not liking simple Amish girls, and I remember seeing a display of softcore Mennonite erotica novels in the 24-hour grocery store. Apparently, there’s a niche for everything, but would a reader aroused by the prospect of a Mennonite threesome be just as titillated by a description of an Amish orgy? Details can be dealbreakers.
There’s a smattering of pickup trucks and SUVs parked outside the hardware store when I arrive. The building itself stands as if a monument to the history and permanence of Quarterville, proclaiming that while there may be a thousand towns like this one, how many thousands more once were and are no more, and how many of the ones that do exist started here, by this side of this road which became a corridor linking the industries of Ohio and New York to Toronto and Montreal. Quarterville is unique. Approaching the store’s brick exterior, I look up and see the late afternoon sun lick the peeling paint of a once vibrant sign: “Benson’s Hardware,” the words say, and the peeling paint says, “We have been here since the beginning.” But like a sun dipping behind a shield of cloud, the sign now takes on another, more sinister, meaning. Because although the chips of paint are the real, the letters they form are a lie. The Bensons are gone, and, if the Bensons, who and what else has mutated unseen under the surface? The answer unnerves me. I’m walking unexpectedly through a David Lynch film. Taking the last few steps separating me from the hardware store’s wide display windows I refuse to look down at the pavement, terrified I’ll see a bloody, severed ear or a twittering wind-up bird.
“Hey, watch where the fuck you’re going!” a woman carrying a box of three-inch nails yells at me, and I manage to dance around her—just—to avoid a collision.
I tap-dance into the store.
Oldies music streams softly from unseen speakers. The two tellers at the two open cash registers eye me with bored contempt. One is a girl, the other a young man, but I know he’s not Kirk Loomis Jr. It would take a specific type of boy to grow up with a girl like Aspen and survive, and the young man at the cash register lacks the distinguishing features. His is an unscarred face. I smile to alleviate any tension. The last few hours of shiftwork are always the worst. No longer dancing, I duck out of view into an aisle of hammers and powertools.
I browse, listening to a tinny Roy Orbison and soaking in the atmosphere of gentrification for perhaps two minutes before my dawdling attracts the attention of a live body that approaches, stands stiffly at my side, and, clearing its phlegmy throat, asks, “Can I help you with anything, sir?”
I look up from a drill. “Yes, I’m here to see—”
Hello, My Name is KIRK.
My eyes, on their way up from a pair of immaculately clean work boots, stop at the nametag just as Kirk Loomis Jr., the man on whose broad chest the nametage is pinned, recognizes me too. “Well, fuck me sideways on Sunday. Cock sucker.”
“The owner,” I finish.
“That’s me. I’m the owner. And just what the fuck do you want here?”
He’s got broad shoulders and he’s taller than he appeared in the pickup truck, though how anyone could appear tall in a pickup truck I can’t at this time imagine. That means I’m nervous. Kirk Loomis slides his work boots shoulder width apart on the floor, and curls one of his hands into a fist. I resist the urge to grab a hammer from the nearby shelf and focus instead on the popped collar of his plaid shirt, its rolled up sleeves, the carefully exposed forearms, and the baseball cap on his head. The Montreal Expos. “I’m here to talk peace,” I say. His upper lip twitches, but I refuse to budge. I reach into my pocket and pull out the letter from the municipal office to my parents. “This has to go away.”
“You have to go away,” he snaps back.
I point at the bottom of the letter. “I know you forged your father’s signature.”
“Give me that.” He swipes at the letter, but I’m faster.
“Make it go away,” I say.
“Then get your fucking paws off my girl.” He points at me, straight to my chest with his rigid finger. “Who do you think you are anyway, showing up, trying to pick her up like that?”
“Dahlia and I went to high school together. We’re just old friends.”
“So go find some new friends.”
The veins on Kirk Loomis’ forearms and forehead slither, and I don’t really want to bite my tongue. He’s thinking hard. “Why don’t you go find a new hardware store?” I hiss.
“Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“This is Benson’s Hardware,” I say.
“Sure was, until I bought it, fair and fucking square.”
“With your father’s money.”
I know I’m playing with fire, but I also know Kirk Loomis won’t cause a scene in his own store. This is undoutedly how Aspen managed her hulk of an older brother. At least, I hope it is. If not, there’s still the shelf with all those hammers…
“Don’t you fucking bring him into this!” Kirk Loomis says, louder than he probably expected. He shrinks slightly at the volume of his own voice. “This shit right here, it’s between you and me, mano a mano.”
“So don’t bring my parents into it, either.”
Then, somewhere under the brim of his Expos cap and behind the dull exterior of his eyes set far back into his meaty head, a spark goes off, and my perception of Kirk Loomis as a goon flickers—off, on. “I tell you what, I got an idea about how we can settle this fair,” he says. “Thursday. Midnight. Meet me behind this here store. Just you, just me.”
“And then what?”
“Then we punch each other in the fucking face until one of us wins and the other loses.”
He can’t be serious. “A fist fight?”
“A man fight. And to the victor go the spoils. If you win, I make your parents’ building permit problem disappear. If I win, you stay fifty fucking feet from Dahlia or I swear I’ll unleash a storm of shit on you and yours that you can’t even hardly begin to imagine.”
“How do we know who the winner is?” I ask, disbelieving the prospect of a fist fight but honestly perplexed by its rules.
“The hell, man. What kind of question is that? It’s a fight.”
The only fight I’ve ever been in was a long time ago on my Super Nintendo. Scorpion versus Subzero, Johnny Cage versus Liu Kang. Zangeif versus Chun-li. He has to be posturing, pulling my leg. “You’re serious?”
“As fucking colon cancer.”
“And if I refuse?”
He rolls down his sleeves and crosses his arms. “Then your parents keep their problem and who knows what other ones that might come up.”
“Must be good to be the mayor’s kid,” I say.
But he doesn’t go for my bait, and instead coolly puts his face close to mine. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
He looks stupid in his baseball cap. His stupid truck chugs litres of gas and pollutes the environment. I would very much like to fuck his sister. “It’s on,” I say.
He sticks out his hand and I, stupidly, shake it.
We turn our backs on each other and walk in opposite ways down the powertool and hammer aisle, I toward the exit, past the tellers, and he to wherever a manager in a hardware store retires to gloat and feel satisfied with himself. Probably the men’s room. Buddy Holly sings, and as my rush of machismo to the head subsides, I rub the right side of my body and try to imagine the paralyzing pain of getting hit flush in the liver. If I had a baseball cap, I would gladly pull it over my head and slink out of town in my Mazda, like the cowardly hero of no movie ever made.
I pull the sun down instead.
And I spend the evening in my bedroom, ostensibly working on my resume and surfing job databases, but actually avoiding my parents, whom I still haven’t told that I’m an unemployed bum, listening to punk and metal and watching YouTube videos of mixed martial arts. Between bouts, I learn the physics of throwing a punch without breaking the bones in your hand and how to keep your hands up and roll with punches to avoid getting knocked out. Floyd Mayweather makes it look easy, and if he can do it, I can too. He never went to law school. I don’t remember falling asleep, but when Wednesday dawns it’s hungover. I’m home alone. The rain clouds drifting past my window look like my head feels. After a while, I switch the window for a bathroom mirror and brush my teeth, but the view remains the same. Every time I look up, I see my face bulbous and grey, bloody, disfigured and bruised. I spit milky toothpaste. Wiping my face with a towel, I begin to admit that I’m scared because I’ve never had the stuffing beaten out of me. I don’t want to have a concussion or missing teeth. By right of a sharp tongue, adolescent diplomacy and an elementary school growth spurt, I evaded that particular rite of boyhood passage. Later, I learned and repeated the mantra that violence is distateful and made a point of pride of what was, in truth, cowardice. Today, my knees are shaking. On my tablet screen, Floyd Mayweather artfully avoids a looping Marcos Maidana right hook, and counters with a stiff left hand to the chin. Maidana staggers backward. Mayweather slips off the ropes and lives to win another round. I rinse, I shave, I slap my cheeks with aftershave.
I reread Kirk Loomis’ letter to my parents.
Threatening letter.
Unlawful, threatening letter.
Motivated by the adjectives, I change into shorts and an old pair of running shoes and go for a jog around the subdivision. With less than forty eight hours to fight time, my soles beat the sidewalk through the rubbery cushions of my shoes, bringing me, with each heavy step, one stride closer to becoming my own Rocky training montage.
Until—at the end of the street—my breath runs out, and I stop, bend forward and taste iron in my lungs.
I spit milky saliva.
Wiping my sweaty face with the back of my hand, I experience deja vu.
The bathroom shower sprays warm water at my open eyes.
I sit awhile, reading the Law Society website and filling out the forms I apparently have to fill out, declaring the possibility of having a damaged character. I imagine a room full of old lawyers, munching on popcorn, watching my drunken performance on Rosie’s video, and taking copious amounts of handwritten notes. Their biting punctuates the scribbling of their pens. I finish writing my version of events and save the file.
For the second time in as many days, I make dinner for my parents, repeating “I lost my job,” “I was fired,” “They let me go,” and a dozen other ways of telling a straightforward, mundane truth. But I know I still won’t be able to speak any of them aloud this afternoon. Being an only child is difficult. All of your parents’ hopes and dreams rest on your shoulders. You are the sole bearer of your family standard, the single thread by which it hangs precariously from the dining room ceiling. Your mission: succeed, procreate and bring up more standard bearers. You can’t even choose not to accept it. What’s more difficult than impossible? Although my parents never put explicit pressure on me, that’s only because a taut string is more likely to snap. At least that’s how I rationalize it, as a take four peeled potatoes out of a pot of boiling water and transfer them to a glass dish I intend to put in the oven.
My parents come home from work, smile, stare, are happy. We eat in a silence seasoned with small talk. My mom has probably instructed my dad not to ask for an update on the deck situation. My dad has probably instructed my mom not to ask if I’ve met any nice girls with whom I will have nice Polish-Canadian babies. “This food is delicious,” my mom says. “It sure is great stepping in the door with dinner already on the table.”
My dad nods.
After dinner, I call the Law Society to ask for the name of the investigator assigned to my case. They refuse to give it.
I drink coffee with my parents and listen to them discuss their vacation plans.
I wait an hour, then descend into the basement, use a moist rag to wipe down a set of unused dumbells, and do bicep curls until my arms hurt.
By seven, I don’t know what to do with myself.
By eight, I’m sitting in my Mazda in the driveway, convincing myself that Dahlia’s probably at the Pharma-Smart already and if I’m going to get my mouth caved in by Kirk Loomis’ fist for seeing her, I might as well see her again. It’s an easy argument to make, and fifteen minutes later I’ve crossed the grocery store parking lot and am passing through the store’s sliding doors, going from a humid summer dusk to the illuminated artificial coolness of retail foodstuffs. Dahlia is indeed working. She’s filling a prescription for a boy and his mother. I watch from a safe distance as the three of them interact. The boy is nervous but putting on a brave face, and I wonder what his ailment is. His mother appears gaunt and tired under the unforgiving lights. I wonder if she, too, is beginning to place on his shoulders the responsibilities of a lone standard bearer. When they leave and no one else approaches the pharmacy counter, I emerge from my hiding spot, covering the distance to the counter with my hands in and my pockets. “Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” Dahlia says. “I was wondering when you’d show up again.”
“Not if?”
“Nope. When.”
“It’s been less than one day.”
She pokes the tip of her tongue out discreetly between the rows of her orthodontically straightened teeth. “I didn’t say I’d been wondering long.” She nods at my hands in my pockets. “No avocado or shrimp today. How’d the omelettes turn out last time?”
“Unsatisfactorily.”
“You know, there’s probably a pill for that,” she teases, her playfulness at odds with the emotion she displayed when we parted.
“Did you get a chance to watch After Hours?” I ask.
“This morning.”
“And?”
“To tell you the truth, I slept through most of it. So… there you are.”
“Oh,” I say.
She brushes her hair behind her ears, and what was a straight face transforms into a big smile. “That was a quote from the movie, monsieur lawyer.” Her ears are definitely crooked. They nearly wiggle. “You’re off your game tonight. Must be all that driving you did catching up with you. I loved it, the movie. It was as weird as you are.”
“You’re pretty weird too,” I say.
“Thanks. And yet you don’t even know the half of it.” I detect a flash of genuine pain, quickly covered up by, “Surrender Dorothy!”
“Surrender Dorothy.”
“It could be our code phrase.”
“We have a code phrase?” I look around for potential pharmacy customers. “More importantly, I hope I’m not holding up your business.”
She waves my concern away. “Business is slow this evening.”
“Must mean people are healthy,” I say.
“Healthy people must are mean,” she says back to me.
For a second, I don’t get it. And one second of hesitation is enough. “You really are off tonight. That’s not normal.” I doubt she knows what my normal is. “What’s up, Charlie?”
Your boyfriend’s going to break my ribs, I want to say. He’s going to make powder out of bones. He’s going to—
It sounds like whining.
I’m the doofus who agreed to a fist fight. My decision, my problem. So I evade the issue. “The better question is, what’s up with you? When we last saw each other, you were leaning into my car, telling me how lucky I was to have a pillow to land on when I fall.”
Her muscles tense up. “Midnight.”
Before I have a chance to ask what that means, a customer leans on the pharmacy counter and pulls out his wallet. “Meet me at the front the doors,” Dahlia says to me while taking a medical note from him. What is it with Quartervillains and the middle of the night, I think, as I nod my approval. Hopefully, Kirk Loomis won’t be trying to pick her up in his pickup truck again. If he is, I might have exactly one more day of pain than expected.
I kill three and a half hours by going to a godawful movie and driving slowly in front of the Loomis house, telling myself I’m daring Aspen to call the police but, really, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. This is what Rosie’s done to me. Fuck Rosie. Fuck Aspen. I punch the steering wheel. Fuck someone. Because: “I want two grandchildren,” my mom’s floating, disembodied head reminds me. “One isn’t enough,” says every parent of every only child ever born. Maybe some standards don’t deserve to be fucking beared.
The streets are empty.
By the time I return to the grocery store, it’s ten minutes past midnight and Dahlia’s already waiting in front of the entrance, her white pharmacist’s coat folded neatly over her forearm. There’s no sign of a GMC pickup truck. I pull up parallel to the sidewalk and wait for her to get in. “Where to on this fine night?” I ask.
“Home.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Mine, for a re-do,” she answers.
Like last time, we drive mostly without talking. I remember the way.
It’s rare that I feel OK with someone without speaking.
The car still hints at the smell of shrimp.
I stop in front of Dahlia’s house but don’t cut the engine, stuck in the state between waiting and parked, trying to figure out if I’m still a stranger who’s not a stranger or something more, someone different. “This time you get out with me,” Dahlia says.
“So we’re re-doing…”
“The end of our last date.”
“The one during which we literally didn’t sleep with each other.”
“Yes.”
Twenty-four hours, stretched, can cover weeks. Car: was idling, is parked. Crickets chirp over the rumble of a passing freight train. Fresh air veils my face. Dahlia walks me to her front door, unlocks it with shaking hands and I follow her inside. Kirk Loomis owes me this. This is going to be my reward for the suffering to which I’m going to wilfully submit tomorrow. Technically, it’s a crime for two men to engage in a consensual brawl if the state disapproves. The state can prosecute for whatever, in the opinion of the state, is contrary to the public good, no matter how willing the participants. Dahlia’s home is a mess. She drapes her pharmacist’s coat over the top of a chair and pulls two beers out of the fridge. “Do you drink?” I do: support that the state doesn’t disapprove of a man and a woman engaging in consensual sexual acts in the privacy of their own homes. Pregnancy is in the public good. I nod. Dahlia pops both beers open and passes one to me. The glass bottle is cold and wet against my skin.
Dahlia takes a drink, and some of the beer escapes her lips and dribbles down her chin. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “I’ve never done this before.”
“It’s OK.”
“I’m in love,” she blurts out.
Mhm.
“God, my heart is beating,” she continues. “But I promised myself that whatever happens I’m not going to stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
She gulps down more beer. “I’m in love and I’ve been in love for a long time. But it was a secret love, a love no one knew about. Not even the person I was in love with. ” I step closer to her. “And then yesterday, when you told me how you quit your job and came here, it motivated me to take the plunge myself and finally tell her the truth.”
I’m already reaching for her when the pronoun—that usually insignificant ingredient of a million meaningless sentences—singes my fingertips.
I drop my beer.
Then scramble to my knees to pick up the bottle before too much beer pours onto the rug, all the time coughing out an apology.
The remaining liquid foams upwards in the bottle.
I mouth the offending word rather than actually say it: her.
Dahlia’s smile is relief itself. I can feel the room pulse in tune with her beating heart. “I like girls, Charlie. I’m a lesbian. I’m gay.”
Words no longer come.
“You gave me the courage to admit that.” She sets her bottle down on the rug in the puddle of my spilled beer and gives me a hug. “You showed me it’s possible to be brave, to leap…”
“But I didn’t leap.” I was pushed out a twelfth-storey apartment window by the woman to whom I’d given my heart. “I was fired.”
“I told her this afternoon,” Dahlia says.
I awkwardly return her hug, which produces a question: “Do you believe in serendipity?”
“I’ve no idea.”
I didn’t truly expect to sleep with Dahlia Esfahani, I repeat in my head. It was a stupid thought, an immature fantasy. Looking at Dahlia’s face, I see happiness, and that happiness also spreads to and through me, even as I try to stop it, even as I struggle to find the proper word, a word that is decidedly not serendipity, to describe the situation of fighting another grown man over the misunderstood affections of a grown woman who likes other grown women. And that’s when it happens: massaging my as of yet unbroken jaw, I feel sorriest not for myself but for Kirk Loomis, whose feelings for Dahlia are more than fantasies, and whose emotions, however coarsely expressed, are now condemned beyond a reasonable doubt by an arbiter no less ruthlessly objective than human biology.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever come out to,” Dahlia says.
“I, uh…”
She kisses my cheek. “Thank you, Charlie.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You sat and listened to a stranger and told her that someone broke your heart and another someone broke your career.”
“That I’m a failure, you mean.”
“Everyone’s a failure. Most of us just don’t have the guts to admit it.”
“You do know your admission’s just beginning, right?” The question sounds harsher than I intend, but that makes it true, because try as I might, I can’t share Dahlia’s enthusiasm for the openness of the world. Most strangers don’t listen. Even fewer care to understand. Out there, in Quarterville and the world beyond, Dahlia’s leap is ongoing. “You’re going to need a lot of pillows if you don’t want to end up hurt.”
She steps away from me, puts her hands on her hips. “I’m aware you’re not at your sharpest today, but you don’t have to lecture a gay person about the realities of being gay.”
“Sorry,” I say. “So when did you know?”
“That I liked girls?”
Taking a swig of foamy beer, I nod.
“In high school.” She bites her lip. “You could say… I kissed a girl and I liked it.”
“That’s cruel.”
“Teasing a boy with fantasies of teenage lesbians?”
Not quite. “Going from quoting Bohemian Rhapsody to quoting Katy Perry.”
She sticks out her tongue.
“A real drop in musical quality, not to mention anachronistic.”
“God, we’re old.”
I say, “We’re not old,” and reach for her beer bottle and the wet rug underneath. I made the mess; I want to clean it up.
“Leave it.”
She pulls me by the hand onto the couch and we sit rigidly beside each other. We haven’t had enough to drink. It’s like a first date, except there’s no chance of it ending in sex. “Why do you think we were never friends in high school?” I ask.
“Because we were different people.”
“Younger people.”
“It’s stupid, but I really do feel old,” she says, “but at the same time I feel like I’m just starting.”
“Like a flower blooming,” I say sweetly.
She chortles. “More like a cheese starting to mould.”
“A fine Brie.”
“Those are an acquired taste.”
“Maybe, but the people who like them, tend to like them a lot.”
“And without the metaphors, please.”
“The older we get, the less generic we become. So maybe we’re meeting at a pretty good time. In high school, we were both just like everyone else.”
“You were never like everyone else,” she says.
“I guess that means by the time I’m eighty I’ll be so unique nobody’ll like me.”
“A muddied up old snowflake.”
The smell of spilled beer permeates the room, but it hardly bothers me. Eighty seems unclutchably far away: separated from me by a gauntlet of admissions of failure, Kirk Loomis fists, and lost loves. “I don’t know if I want to live that long,” I say.
I can tell she doesn’t know how to respond, so I add, “On a less depressing note, if you liked After Hours, there’s another Martin Scorsese comedy you should check out. The King of Comedy.”
“After Hours wasn’t especially funny.”
“Neither is this one.”
We talk for half an hour more, then I wish her good night and leave without even soaking her rug in clean water.
My parents’ home is cavernous. One day, they too will be eighty years old or dead. My footsteps echo down the hall to my room. I grab my pillow and sheets and drag them behind me down the stairs, through the downstairs living room and outside, onto the deck. If I could, I would drop my surname, sign myself out of the family line and become what apparently comes more naturally to me: Defender of the Deck. Lawyers are nothing but contemporary mercenaries. That’s one of the things I liked about being one. I didn’t need causes of my own. I fought gladly for ready-made ones without, ultimately, caring about them. I cared about the fight. I cared about winning.
The night is warm and I don’t want to sleep in a box, so I lie on the smooth cedar boards and stare up at the sky and the bottom beams of the balcony, where a carpenter bee has been excavating a fine shelter for itself. A trickle of sawdust, sparkling in the moonlight, escapes from the hole. Maybe the carpenter bee is still working; maybe it’s tossing and turning in its sleep. I attempt to be without shame. If my neighbours see me on the deck, oh well. If my parents see me—
I return quietly to my room.
I sleep in my bed.
“Good morning, Beaver,” my mom whispers, peaking into my room. “We’re off to work.”
I mumble something in response and fall back asleep.
I wake up a little before 10:00 a.m., feeling like a bum, and immediately roll out of bed, shielding my eyes from the unwelcome sunlight by rubbing my fingers into them, before changing into yesterday’s clothes and frying up two eggs and a few strips of bacon for breakfast. I have coffee for dessert. My eyelids twitch and my eyes water. I’m not well rested. I come up with a hundred things to do but do none of them. I don’t do them in order. Even my hair fails to stay in place. Messy haired, I wonder what Dahlia is doing, what Aspen is wearing and with whom Rosie spent the night. I floss until my gums bleed because it makes me feel tough. In the afternoon, I prepare dinner for three people, and when my parents and I eat I again don’t tell them that I’m out of a job. We do a crossword puzzle. I dazzle with my intelligence, I collect compliments I don’t deserve, I talk about beets, Bayern Munich, and a significant chance of thunderstorms. I make my parents laugh, which I consider the only productive part of the day, before excusing myself and going for a walk. It’s a school night but it’s early, so kids scream and play in the street and chase each other around barbecues laden with chicken and hamburger patties. I used to be a kid, but I never played in the street. I don’t like barbecued meat. Irrationally, I yearn for a childhood that I didn’t have and don’t remember ever wanting, and I don’t know why. My childhood was happy without charcoal and noise. I still am happy: because I don’t have a reason to be unhappy. I am beset suddenly by the fear that someone will recognise me and I’ll be forced to narrate the events of my life from the time I left Quarterville until now, and, when I’m done, that someone, most likely the local Catholic priest, will look down at me kneeling and say, “Dear child, you are forgiven. Now, stay forever and sin no more.”
I fish my phone out of my pocket and call Rosie.
Would it be so bad to beg for her to forgive me and take me back?
She doesn’t answer.
I turn my phone off in case she tries to return my call. That puts me in control. It also means I won’t be sure that she didn’t return my call.
“How was your walk?” my mom asks.
“Fine.”
Dust trickles down from the carpenter bee’s hole in the bottom balcony beam.
My dad and I are sitting on the edge of deck, drinking beer. If I told him about the bee he’d probably kill it. Fortunately, he’s staring ahead at the rolling yard and the grass that my mom will soon tell him to mow, so the bee is safe.
When my parents go to sleep, I go to sit in my Mazda in the driveway, replaying in my head my scene with Kirk Loomis until I decide that even if his offer of a fist fight was ironic, I still have to show up at the appointed time and place. If he’s not there, I can leave. If he is there and I don’t show up, I’ll have lost the psychological battle. Losing is unthinkable, especially to a meat-head like him. But as I back carefully out of the driveway, my throat constricts and my foot starts to shake above the accelerator. I’m doing this for my parents, I tell myself. My foot shakes a little less. And I know bravery, because that’s what it took Dahlia to tell me she’s gay. I can breathe. Hockey players and boxers talk about visualizing their victories: I see myself standing over Kirk Loomis’ beaten body, the heel of my shoe digging into his neck, his bloody lips muttering the incomprehensible wet syllables of defeat, as a deep and distorted voice yells: “Finish him!”
I’m such a fucking nerd.
Nerds don’t fight.
I scan radio stations until I find some thudding hip hop.
I nod my head to the primitive beat.
I’m scared.
Pulling into the parking lot of Benson’s General Hardware, I notice I’m forty minutes early, but I can’t turn around now. I’m sure Kirk Loomis has seem me, that he’s keeping watching from inside the store, expecting me to run away. So I park in a spot in the middle of lot, cut the radio, slap the numbness out of my cheeks, and step onto pavement.
My legs feel like they’ve been wrapped in plaster.
When I’m halfway to the store, its front doors slam open and Kirk Loomies emerges into the night.
“You showed up,” he says.
“Yeah.”
Our voices bloat the surrounding shadows.
“That took balls.”
“Yeah.”
He’s wearing his baseball cap, which he slides off his head, rotates and replaces with the rim facing backward. I roll up my sleeves. All the better to make him eat some of my Jon Jones elbows, I hope.
“Bring your car round back,” he says. “That’s where we do this shit.”
I back up awkwardly to my Mazda, Kirk Loomis disappears into the store, and I drive slowly across the parking lot, around Benson’s General Hardware, to the loading area behind. I haven’t been here since sixth grade, when my dad and I bought lumber to build a new fence. I haven’t been this nervous since I wrote the LSAT in a dank university classroom with about two hundred other wannabe law students. But tonight I feel significantly more ridiculous. Not that it calms me any.
Kirk Loomis’ GMC pickup truck is already waiting, idling like a mechanical puma.
I see it before seeing Kirk Loomis, who motions for me to park my car about fifty paces from his, our hoods facing. His truck outweighs my Mazda by several weight classes.
He reaches through its open window and turns on the headlights.
Twin low beams spear the darkness.
“Yours too,” he says.
Sometime between meeting me in the parking lot and now, Kirk Loomis has started smoking a cigarette. He takes a drag, spits and sticks it back in his mouth. “Well?”
I turn on my lights, whose cones reach lower than his, and exit my car into the brilliant area between the two vehicles.
He steps up to me until we’re face to face, a menacingly black and crisp silhouette.
“We should probably go over the stakes again before we—”
I fly backward as he palms me in the chest, barely able to keep my balance as my eyes must be saucers, processing input from my brain that this fight is really happening. I open my mouth to say something, but I don’t know what. Dahlia Esfahani is a lesbian! Of course, I don’t say that. I can’t out someone, least of all a friend who had the courage to confide in me. I slide my shoes double shoulder-width apart.
“Well?”
“Well what?” I ask.
“Don’t just stand there. Fucking push me back.”
I launch myself forward and with a cry of “I got fired!” connect cleanly against Kirk Loomis’ body.
It thuds. Before he can regain his senses, I follow with a kick to his shin.
He bounces momentarily on his other foot. “What the hell, man? You don’t kick people!”
But Anderson Silva—
He catches me with a solid jab to the nose.
“Shit!”
He shakes his fist in pain.
I bring mine up to my nose and feel the warmth of fresh blood, but I refuse to show my panic. So what if my nose is going to be crooked for the rest of my life? I block his second punch, a wild right, and put all my strength into a counter to the exposed left side of his body.
The impact sounds gruesome, like a bass drum kick played at half speed, and Kirk Loomis staggers backward.
I’m certain I broke my wrist.
“Oh, it’s… on!” he yells, and comes at me swinging wildly, artless lefts and overcooked rights that any decent boxer would be able to dodge and take easy advantage of, but that overwhelm me, an idiot in the first fight of his life, as I attempt to cover up, elbows together, hands clutching my hair. But for every five blows I deflect, one sneaks through and smacks the side of my face. “Cocksucker, motherfucker, pansy ass bitch!”
Until, finally, I spin out of the way and find myself behind him, and, for a split second, I know I can push him—hit him from behind so that his forehead dents the bumper of his pickup truck, and then bash its headlights out with his face until his world goes dark and he has to spend the next three days in the hospital while doctors pick tiny pieces of sharp plastic out of his face with sterilized tweezers! My lust for blood, however, is stillborn. I wait until he’s facing me, his nostrils flaring, and drive an uppercut into his jaw instead.
The only reaction is a devilish smile, which I recognize on his face just as I feel it spread over mine—and he returns my uppercut with an uppercut of his own.
My head snaps back.
The blood flowing from my nose splatters into my eyes.
Still half blinded, I throw a superman punch but trip over my feet before it lands and sprawl face forward on the ground, scraping both forearms and an elbow.
I hear laughter.
I hear a faraway car door slam.
I push myself up, already as out of breath as after yesterday morning’s run, anticipate the impact of a punch that doesn’t arrive and let out a howl of my own laughter, before realising that all around me is: sudden silence.
Rubbing my eyes, I take in my surroundings, my Mazda and Kirk Loomis’ pickup truck, both sets of low beams still on, the ground, the sky, and the back of Benson’s General Hardware, all in various shades of black, and Kirk Loomis himself, standing tall but sucking in air, except something about his silhouette is off, it’s not facing me, I hear leather boots, the cadence of a determined, military step, which loudens, until through eyes squinting because they’ve too much light in them, I see the blur of a large shape go past me, as if ignoring my very existence, and head toward Kirk Loomis, whose breathless, whispering stammer sounds in the overwhelming quiet like sandpaper screaming. “Sir… sir…”
I stay where I am.
Kirk Loomis is tall, but this new figure towers over him. No longer walking—no longer a blur—I see that it is plainly a man: an older man with grey hair and a white beard, wearing jeans, tanned skin and an unbuttoned Cuban shirt. The man carries a briefcase, which he sets down, and wears a gold watch, which he unfastens without the slightest hint of urgency and gives to Kirk Loomis to hold. The latter holds it out like an offering.
“Sir, please,” Kirk Loomis pleads.
“Fool,” the man replies. “Shut your mouth, take the briefcase and come with me. I’ll deal with you in private.”
Although I know that “in private” refers directly to my presence, nothing in the man’s behaviour suggests he’s aware of my existence. I remain an unacknowledged observer, unworthy of appreciation. So this, I understand, is the first Kirk Loomis. Kirk Loomis Senior. He turns, and the second Kirk Loomis, already holding the gold watch, picks up the briefcase and follows after his father like a dutiful dog.
I am left alone.
I cannot recognise my own breathing from the idling engines of the two vehicles in whose headlights I’m bathed. Much of me feels swollen and I can’t shut my mouth. My nose is still dripping blood onto my shirt. Because the window of Kirk Loomis’ pickup truck is still down, I reach inside, turn off the lights and kill the engine. It would be a lie to say I don’t know why I do it, so instead I call my reason an unacknowledged truth. For a second time, I feel sorry for Kirk Loomis—whose father is a monster, whose love for Dahlia is a monstruous joke, and whose willingness to confront me is rare in a world in which we vociferously condemn violence by merely practising it behind each other’s back. By which I mean that I regret not punching Winterson on the nose. So rest in peace, trial by combat, (1) most inelegant, (2) no less just than any other, and (3) perhaps more honourable than most, method of settling a dispute. Evolution has made you redundant.
I don’t sleep that night.
In the bathroom, using only the thinnest and most quiet stream of water, I wash my wounds and allow myself to hurt.
I cry my heart out.
By the morning, I’m drained of tears and sporting the makings of one of the finest shiners I’ve ever seen. Thus, bruised and seated at the kitchen table, I wait for my parents’ alarm to sound. When it does, I prepare myself. My mom sees me first:
“My God!”
My dad comes running, sleepy-eyed. “Are you OK? What happened? Should we call the police?”
“I got fired,” I say.
They stare at me without blinking.
“My girlfriend, Rosie, dumped me and my law firm, Winterson and Partners, fired me,” I go on. “That’s why I came back here. In one day, I was out of a job and out of an apartment, and I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” Although I’m not giving them the whole story, what I am saying is coming out surprisingly easily. “Is it alright if I stay until I get back on my feet?”
“But, your face…” my mom manages to say somehow without closing her mouth.
“This?” I point to my swollen cheek. “It’s nothing. I got into a fight last night. But you should have seen the other guy.” You should have seen the other guy’s father. He’s nothing like my father. Their family is nothing like my family. His childhood was nothing like my childhood. “I love you guys,” I say.
“Beaver…”
“So can I stay?”
Tears streams down my mom’s cheek. “Of course you can stay.” She hugs me again, even harder than last time, so hard that, given the state of my body, it hurts.
The hug is interrupted finally by a knock at the door.
My dad answers, and returns holding a letter.
My mom and I watch as he opens it.
He reads it over, then hands it to me. “It’s from the town,” he says. I read it and hand it to my mom.
She reads it and looks up. “So we don’t have to take down our deck anymore?”
“We don’t,” my dad says.
As she looks at him, my dad looks at me, and in the look that passes between us, I know he understands: I went out and banged my head against a dude’s fist so that my parents could keep their money and their deck. The details aren’t important. What’s important is that I swear to God he’s more proud of me now than when I got called to the bar.
“Personally signed, with an apology for the original error, by the mayor himself,” my dad says, taking the letter back. “The government admitting a mistake. We should frame it.”
“You’ll be late for work,” I say.
I make breakfast.
My dad pats me on the back when my mom’s already waiting for him in the garage. “Their loss.”
“Whose?”
“That law firm, whatever it was called.” I know he knows what it’s called. I appreciate his use of the past tense. “And that girl, whatever her name was.”
“Rosie,” I say.
“There’ll be more girls and better ones than Rosie.” He lowers his voice before adding, “Plenty more.”
I don’t tell him that I was in love with Rosie, but I do appreciate my own use of the past tense, however deliberate. When I wince, he probably thinks it’s because I’m sore. He pats me on the back again. “Any weasel with a brain can be a lawyer. It takes character to do something good with your life.”
As soon as the garage door closes, I read over my letter to the Law Society, print it off and walk it to the mail box. Then I swallow some Tylenol and sit on my bed with my tablet and my C.V. I alter the C.V. to be less focused on law and generally less rigid, and after considering my skills, I decide that it’s likely in my best interest to learn French. I create a profile on several language learning websites, indicating that I’m a native English speaker who’s fluent in Polish and who wants to learn French for career advancement. Nothing happens. I send a dozen messages to a dozen other users, none of whom respond. I receive a badly written, sexually suggestive message from a 34-year old Egyptian man who mistook me for a woman. I try to read the Little Prince in its original French and fail miserably.
At noon, which is the opposite of midnight, I knock on Dahlia’s front door. I’ve got The King of Comedy on a USB stick and a desire to tell her that I’ll be staying in Quarterville longer than I planned. I want to cement our friendship.
She answers wearing slippers and a robe, but her ongoing yawn quickly morphs into, “Jesus, Charlie, what on earth happened to you?”
“I told the truth.”
“To who?”
She’s blocking the front door. “May I come in?” I ask.
“I’m not… alone.”
“I know I must look awful, but I don’t think I look horrible enough to scare anyone. I remain in possession of all my teeth.” I smile to prove my point.
“It’s just that, my guest—”
“Listen, if the two of us are going to be friends, I think I’m going to have to meet your special ‘her’ sometime. It’s really no big deal.”
Dahlia bites her lip.
I hear shuffling from inside the house.
“Actually,” a woman’s approaching voice says, “I believe we’ve already met.” Dahlia steps aside and standing behind her, also in slippers and a robe, is Aspen Loomis.
Thanks to flickr user emilykneeter, whose photo “suburban sunsets” I used to make the book cover. Because she’s an awesome photographer, you should also check out her website.