Away From Everywhere (9 page)

That very night his father shifted from hiding his theories to trying to justify them. He “admitted” that the pizza fliers being delivered to their mailbox were coded, that his supposed employer was leaving them there. He showed her the “codes,” a drawer full of pizza fliers with certain letters underlined to spell out a hidden message. Among the lines of the flyer in his hand,
E
AT AT SA
L'S
TON
I
GHT.
E
AT
S
MART.
T
RY OUR
R
E
A
L
S
ICILIAN CURED
H
AM. The underlined letters spelled
Elsie'sTrash.
What frightened them the most was the four letters underlined in the next sentence: TA
K
E
I
N A
L
ITTLE SICI
L
Y
TONIGHT
! He assured them he wasn't there to kill her.

“I'm just the journalist, Claire, don't worry. Anything that serious would be left to other agencies, not the journalist division. I really don't understand what the kill code means, but it is not an instruction for me, and we are not in any
real
danger unless you blow this out of proportion and–”

“Roger,
please!
Think about it. Where are the paycheques from this company?Where is the goddamn
magazine
?What is it called and where can I buy–”

“It's not
that
kind of magazine,Claire. It doesn't need a title, because–”

“
Roger!
C'mon. You're smarter than this.” Screeching now, her words ripping out of her throat. “How can you be selling a magazine with no goddamn name?”

He sat there so calm, so unaffected by her emotions. “It's not
that
kind of magazine. It's not the kind of thing you'll find mixed in with trashy celebrity magazines in a grocery store checkout. And it's only being distributed underground to an elite audience, for now.”

His father spent three months in a psychiatric ward on medication, getting therapy from a young and gifted specialist in schizophrenia. Dr. Erickson managed to convince him that the magazine was all a delusion. At first, Owen's father thought the doctor was just trying to censor and sabotage his magazine by locking away all of its contributors, but the doctor was crafty enough to convince him otherwise. The drugs helped, once they settled on the right pill, CPZ, and a dosage that didn't make him twitch or slur his speech too badly. The doctor recognized that Roger was an intelligent man and used a lot of logic in his therapy. One day he took him to Elsie's garbage cans and let him go through them. He took him inside Elsie's house to meet Elsie and let him root around until he was satisfied it was just some old lady's house. He showed him that everyone on the street was receiving those fliers and took him to meet the men who published the fliers. With a lot of therapy, and CPZ,Dr. Erickson brought Owen's father back to reality.

In November, his mother signed all the necessary papers to get him out. He convinced her he could control his disorder with the CPZ and cognitive therapy. He could convince anyone of anything. And formonths, right through Christmas, he was fine.

But, every time he'd stare off into a distance or think he heard something in the middle of the night, like anyone does, Owen was afraid his father was seeing that imaginary employer again. Or worse. Once Owen knew his father's mind could wander, there was no telling how far. Alex told Owen, maybe every night, different stories he read about schizophrenics killing their neighbours, cats, dogs, mothers, fathers, significant others …kids. Each story exaggerated, but absolutely eerie and unnerving. His father's illness, and the stories Alex told him, changed the environment the brothers grew up in. It fractured it. The world was no longer as small and simple as it had always seemed. It was bigger now, unpredictable, too complicated and unstable for them to retain that blind joy all their friends had. Owen felt distant from his parents and – because of differing opinions on their father – wary of of his brother.

By April of that year, their mother had to hide any fliers that came to their house, and write
NO JUNK MAIL
on their mailbox. She had to get out of bed every night and snoop through her husband's office to see what he was up to in there all day long. She found pages and pages of absolute gibberish, filed neatly away in labeled folders and drawers. Every morning, the word salads were getting worse and worse, and one night she overheard him talking to his “old employer” in the basement. As he picked up on his family's wariness, he grew suspicious of them, and talked about how their eyes seemed “redder than they used to be.” He talked about how his wife's face seemed to be changing.“You're always frowning at me, your eyebrows are always furrowed.”The food always tasted funny. He was given new meds, new doses, Owen's exhausted mother reading up on them all.

When he was at his best, he would cry and beg her not to sign the papers. All the guilt and indecision was killing her, it never got better, just worse. She knew once she recommitted him, he wouldn't be coming back; she'd be essentially sending him off to die. All the while, Owen knew that if his mother didn't have two children to worry about, she'd never even
think
of sending him back. Every night he heard them fight and cry, he thought of her burden, acknowledged it, and felt something akin to guilt over it. She considered sending them to stay with their father's parents while they all waited for the new medication to take effect. He overheard this in a phone call one night, from the laundry room. He needed a towel, and there were none. He dried off with a pair of pajama bottoms that night. He ran the water cold, for the shock of it, to avoid crying, to avoid feeling.

The bad days were punctuated by good weeks, but one night their father came too close to hurting them. They were all sitting in front of the TV watching
The Wonder Years
when a U-haul truck pulled up in front of their house. Its lights blazed in through the windows, and the rattle from the truck, surreally loud, drowned out the television. He shot up from his chair, drew the curtains closed and yelled at his family.“Get down in the basement! Now! We've got to stick together!” He was screaming so loud veins threatened to burst out of his neck and forehead. “They can't tear us apart, not now, no matter what!”

Before they could collectively assess what to do, their father was yelling at the empty space beside Owen, pointing a knife at a man who was not there.

“Stay
away
from my kid, Ted. You said it wouldn't come to– Owen! Don't move like that! I'm done with the work, Ted. Hurting my family won't change that!
Owen
, My
God!
Stop moving!”

While their mother phoned the police, Alex tackled their father from behind, and he went mad then, suspicious and livid about his own son turning on him. He threatened Alex for crossing him. It took all three of them to pin him down and wait for the police.

He was recommitted that very night. When it was all over, what got to them more than anything was the realization that maybe the man had never seen a point in anything but his work. It
was
true in the end, that when he was writing those imaginary stories to no one, he wouldn't even sit to eat with them. He was
too busy
. His delusions about being a revolutionary journalist, his going mad because he wasn't, made them feel not enough. Second to some non-existent magazine.

After realizing he'd threatened his sons that night, he ceased talking, permanently. Within weeks of being recommitted to the Waterford Hospital, he fell into a catatonic state. He sat in a rickety wooden chair, perpetually rocking back and forth and mumbling to himself in a small, dark room. They would go visit him from time to time, but it felt futile. He had no idea they were there. He didn't even look up. Not even when Owen “accidentally” stepped on his foot to try and get some reaction from him, some proof of life. The hospital treated him with a controversial drug, Clozapine, used on “treatment-resistant” patients. It spiked his white blood cell count to dangerous levels. It gave him seizures and never changed a thing. He was gone. A mannequin, not a man. If Owen bent his father's finger or raised his arm, it stayed that way.
Waxy flexibility
, the doctor called it. Like his father was some kind of human doll; a wax figure. Inert.

A month later, Owen came home from school and found his mother asleep on his bed. She was on her side. His baby blue pillow had a few navy drips on it: his mother's tears. The sight of her tears didn't help to share the burden of a mutual loss. It accentuated that loss. The tears never brought them closer together. They simply stated they weren't a family anymore. Just three people coping. Readjusting. Coming out of it as different people.

His math exercise book was wedged between her hip and the mattress and pointing up diagonally off the bed – the one he'd written in the night before instead of doing his trigonometry homework. She must have been reading it, before the tears and the nap.

When Dad was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I promised us both that I wouldn't treat him any differently. When he was committed to a hospital, I
promised myself I wouldn't see him any less. But now that he is catatonic, I don't have any part of him left to hold on to. His body is still there, physically, in that cold dark room, but he is long gone. He is a beating heart in a net of nerves and nothing more. Wherever he went, he took some vital part of me with him. The part of me that could have favourite TV shows and movies, and give a shit about music. The part of me that could smile at a day like today: the last of the snow is gone and it is jeans and T-shirt weather and everyone is finding reasons to be outside. Not us. It doesn't help that Mom is a zombie now too. Just a different kind. And Alex is pretending like nothing happened. And my friends just change the topic.

When Alex and I were eight, Dad took us camping.
When we registered and paid for our lot in Terra Nova National Park, we were given pamphlets on bear safety.
I read that campers were not to leave food out in the open, and should cover any trash in order to avoid luring bears.
Desperately excited to see a bear, I left a trail of crumbs leading to our trailer, I uncovered the garbage, I did everything the pamphlet said not to do. I never ate half of my hotdog at lunch, or half of my burger at supper, so that I could lay the remains out for the bear that never came.
I waited for Dad and Alex to fall asleep and sat outside the trailer for over an hour, just waiting. Nothing. And I fell asleep disappointed.

I only now realize why I could have done something so careless when I was a kid. It was because I felt like Dad could have protected me from anything. Not simply that a father can protect his children, but more specifically that Roger Collins could save Owen Collins from anything. The day Dad tackled me and threatened Alex was the day I lost that feeling of childhood naiveté. I don't think anyone should be able to attribute that loss to one distinct memory.

OH TO BE SQUAT BETWEEN A WALL AND A LOVER

July 30th, 2008,
Back from the grocery store.

I just walked to the bakery for some focaccia bread. The kids love it, and I'm an addict. I've joked with Gene, the European baker, that he ought to put an addiction notice on all his baked goods. He's such an endearing man, always covered head to toe in flour and bliss, always chatting with his customers in his broken English. Bellowing at them as if they were across the room. “TODAY, HAH-NAH, I HAVE JUST MADE DE CHOGOLATE-STRAWBERRY DANISH FOR YOU!”
He actually does that clichéd Italian gesture of kissing his fingers and flicking them away from his mouth when he boasts about something culinary: “MOAW!” He is reason enough to shop there. He knows the girls, Callie's sweet tooth. He gives me little treats free of charge to bring her. She makes him little crafts that he tacks up on the wall in the back room: drawings of bakers with giant chef hats, or chocolate chip cookies made out of brown foam and black pipe cleaners.

There were couples everywhere as I walked back home. Couples, and me alone. Happy couples, possessed by each other's presence.
Basking in each other. New lovers, true couples, they take that enthrallment for granted. To be in love like that is to cease to exist, to be freed from yourself, to be found in each other. Not everyone can say they would let go of everything for one person.
Not without hesitation, not without lying. It is a confidence and a thrill for the new lovers only, or those few rare couples whose bond even time admires and shies away from.

There was a couple walking their excited German shepherd on a taut red leash. It kept spinning around, getting tangled up in its leash, and jumping up and down, its nails clicking off the sidewalk. It kept turning around and hoisting itself up on two legs and patting at their chests with its front paws in a “Hey! Look at me!” kind of way. They were standing so close together that the dog's left paw was on the guy's chest and the right on the girl's. There was no space between them. They even walked in step. They were used to the dog jumping all over them. Jumping all over them in a way that meant they must walk that dog every night, together. Together. Together, and me there alone.