Love Enough (2 page)

Bedri ran toward the Beemer. Breathless when he arrived, he said, “What the fuck, man?”

“Let’s go,” Ghost said, jumping out and spinning him around. “Go! We’re ditching it.”

“Why?”

“Why? Shit, Money, you could never think. They’ll be on us quicker now.”

“Then what did we do that for? Let’s take it to the guy in the east. The Audi ride too.”

“He won’t want this one now.”

“Turn it off!” Bedri said. Ghost had left the car running.

“What?”

“Turn it off—someone will hear it.”

“It’s a fucking park, Money!”

“Turn it off! Fuck!”

Ghost reached into the car and turned the engine off. Then he angled sideways like a pitcher and threw the keys into the darkness. Bedri began to run back toward the Audi. Ghost dropped in beside him and they sprinted together.

Bedri had a thick body. Ever since he was a child he’d had difficulty running. He was running now though and his body didn’t feel thick, it felt wet, steaming. It felt fleet. They couldn’t keep the fucking car now; they beat a man to death. Maybe. And now they couldn’t keep his fucking Beemer.

The hundred metres felt longer that it was. He couldn’t feel his feet. Instead he felt like a fish swimming. Swimming beside Ghost. They got to the Audi and Bedri jumped into the driver’s seat. His hands felt big. Ghost seemed like a hot pinpoint of fire beside him. Bedri’s hands felt huge. They burned when he touched the steering wheel. They burned when he turned the key in the ignition. The key was hot as melting silver.

Ghost, his face lit, his body coiled, wiry, he was glad he didn’t have to drive, his long fingers trembled, he felt like going to the bathroom, his body let off an odour, like iron. He wanted to say something wise or something cruel again but he was quiet.

Bedri drove. He drove fast. Something told him to drive slow, and he tried but he couldn’t. He heard a yelp, it was coming from inside his head and it was coming out of his mouth but he clamped his lips shut holding it in. From the passenger seat he heard, “Whoa, whoa, man!” He lifted his foot off the gas. He should slow down.

“Whoa, man, you feel me? You feel me, Money? That was the bomb!” Ghost had found something to say and his mouth was saying it.
The bomb, the bomb
. Bedri tried to make sense of the word. He felt as if he had inhaled water, or coke, or air freshener. His nose was clear, a burning skittered over his forehead, under the bone near his eyes.

“Did you see that guy? Man, he was a mess. The guy was a mess.”

Yes, Bedri had seen the face, the eyes swollen so quickly after one blow, it seemed. Yes, he saw the face. Fuck.

“We are thugged out, man! Thugged out!” Ghost’s mouth found the exact words. Bedri felt Ghost’s hand on his shoulder, brotherly and loving, it made him yell too.

“Yeah, yeah, thugged out.” He heard his own voice turn to a croak, “The guy was messed up!” His croaking made no sense to him and his laughter made no sense to him. He was hardly looking at the road, his big swelling hands seemed to block out half the windscreen.

“Yeah, damn, Money. Damn!” Ghost’s voice filled the car and Bedri felt it boom in his head.

Bedri yelled back, “Yeah, damn, Money, whoa! Fucker didn’t want to give it up. Fucker, man!”

The noise in the car was overwhelming. They were both screaming and a hot mist from their bodies clouded the windscreen. Bedri lowered the driver’s window. A cold shock of air came into the car though it was summer. A warm summer night, the kind that is quiet on this highway. They smelled a fleeting smoke, a fireplace somewhere out here, the air made them gasp, quieted them. Ghost giggled; a gurgling, spitting giggling. “Man, man, did you see his face?” The air from the window made Bedri aware that he was sweating, his face was cold, dripping ice. The smoke from the fireplace somewhere drifted to them and left them. He opened his eyes wide to focus on the road. He’d found the 401 somehow, turned west on it towards Toronto and driven into the express lane. The highway sound of cars grrred in his left ear, he liked it. It drowned out Ghost’s giggling.

“Fucked up. Fuck up. Fucked up, man!” Ghost was talking to himself. “Fucked up bad.”

“Shut up!”

“Man, he didn’t want to give the shit up!”

“Shut up, Ghost …”

“Shut up?”

“Yeah, we got to think, right? What to do.”

“Do? We don’t got
nothing
to do. Don’t think too hard, thug. It’s easy like that, man, easy like that. Fucker should have given it up.”

“Suppose …”

“Suppose nothing. He should have given the shit up.” Bedri didn’t know how to feel what he was feeling. Ghost seemed happy, really high. He should be happy, he should be stoked. Was he dead? His body, big and soft, felt bigger, softer. He took one hand, his left, off the steering wheel, there was something wet on it. Then he felt like gagging. He wanted to scream and gag. He put the hand out the window and scraped whatever it was off the doorframe. He let out a scream that the highway ate, the whimper at the end slid up under the wheels.

“That’s what I’m saying!” Ghost responded to Bedri’s scream as if they were sharing the same feelings. Bedri looked over at him. He was on a joyride, the thing they just
did, and the thing that was supposed to make him feel high too, he couldn’t bear the thought of it.

“Let’s get some dope, man. Let’s get a beer,” Ghost said.

“Sure,” he said weakly. “Sure.” He drove himself off the highway.

“Don’t punk out on me man, don’t punk out,” Ghost said. Bedri said nothing. Three hours ago that would have pissed him off, three hours ago Ghost could never have said that and got away with it, one hour ago. He felt his big self getting smaller as if he was sweating himself away. The man’s face, a small scar, a moon scar already on the cheekbone. One minute he was pounding the man’s face into the pavement, next minute he felt nauseous. How many guys had he landed his big fist on? From grade school to now. Even Ghost. He had beaten him up. All the time. When they were living raw on Gerrard Street.

Fuck that guy, fuck his face. The guy had thought he was hardcore, but Bedri made the moon scar on his face turn crimson. His father, he thought of his father. His father would say,
I pay, I take shit, and look who you turn out to be. I stay in camps, I lose everything
. His father loomed over him, grabbing his face, squeezing tears from his eyes.
I lose everything, for you to shame me
. When did his father stop saying this to him? When he, Bedri, loomed larger, made a bigger shadow
over the dinner table. That was the way it was. A bigger man overshadowed a smaller man. That was all.

“Where we going, man?” Ghost grabbed Bedri’s shoulder. Bedri had steered the car down the Allen Expressway and west onto Eglinton Avenue. The rush of the highway subsided here, dismal shops blinked dimly, the dry cleaners, the wig shop, the barrel store, the patty shops, the curtained shadows of regular life moving in the apartments above.

“Montreal … Let’s go to Montreal. It’s tight there.” Ghost was still stoked; his hand on Bedri’s shoulder carried a current. Bedri felt his neck heat up from the touch. Hot moonlight, hot smoke, he thought, electric index.

“Montreal,” he repeated the word. “Montreal, yeah, maybe. It’s tight there?” There was a childish note in his voice, not the way that question should sound, sleepy and as if he was about to cry.

“Don’t fucking bring me down, guy. Let’s do this.” Ghost thumped him with an elbow. “Let’s get some gas right here, right here!” Ghost pointed to a gas station on the left.

“Okay, okay. I can see.” Bedri pulled into the station and climbed out of the car. “My father …” he said for no reason, and walked toward the street. Ghost got out and
pumped gas into the tank, all the time calling Bedri from the station. “Hey. Hey, hey, B!” When he put the nozzle back into the pump he signalled to the man behind the glass in the station’s small shop that he was coming and walked toward the street. “Don’t lose it, man.”

Bedri said, “My father …”

“Nobody don’t know nothing, guy.”

He followed Ghost back to the car and waited while Ghost paid for the gas, and when he came back he said over the roof of the car, “I’m going home, Ghost. Take me home.” Ghost said nothing but got into the driver’s seat. Bedri stood outside for a moment then got in. They drove back onto Eglinton, still going west.

“My father is going to kill me.” Bedri finished the sentence he had been trying to make at the gas station. Ghost chuckled and when Bedri looked at him, Ghost raised an exaggerated eyebrow. “Just saying. He would kill me.”

Ghost sucked his teeth in disgust. “So what, guy? So fucking what.”

N
o misunderstandings, no embraces. No kisses, no fledgling love affair. No late nights when Jasmeet’s voice would call up to Lia begging from the street to throw the keys down. She was always forgetting or losing her keys. And Lia’s feeling of being clear and open for the first time? A casualty. Just like their meeting, their friendship, their near love. Brief.

It occurs to her that you can go to sleep at night as one person and wake up the next morning as another. It occurs to her that you can go down into the subway at Main as one person and emerge at Lansdowne another.
That’s probably how Jasmeet disappeared. Simple transposition; she went away and when she tried to return she was someone else.

Lia is listening to Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green. She likes music without words. This music makes her feel ubiquitous. Bullshit she tells herself. After all, she can’t reach Jasmeet, and ubiquity would be able to help her do that. Ubiquity could find anything. She has gone by all of Jasmeet’s haunts, the Ossington galleries, the late night diner on Dupont Street, the Fusion Underground Club on Augusta. No one knows where Jasmeet is. No one’s heard from her.

This is how they met. Lia has hauled the garbage bags with her belongings up the stairs to her new room. She’s figuring out how to turn the key in the lock when the next room door opens. The smell of lavender and marijuana fills the hallway. Someone like her, like her age maybe, like twenty, except not like her, dressed like … crazy, rushes out. “Hey,” she says, glorious smile, “I’m Jasmeet, your new best friend. Can you hold these keys for me, please? I’m always losing keys.” Lia forgets her own business, drops her bags, reaches her hand to Jasmeet, takes the keys, then they both laugh. Instant.

The rent hasn’t been paid. The landlady, Mrs. Cho, knocks every day at Jasmeet’s vacant room. Lia is on the lookout for her, she listens to Mrs. Cho come up the stairs and when she knocks on Jasmeet’s door, Lia rushes out saying,
Jasmeet is sick, Mrs. Cho!
when Jasmeet isn’t even there.
Have a little patience
, she tells Mrs. Cho,
have a little compassion
. She fends off the landlady for quite a while with the sheer will of her expectation that Jasmeet will be back. She’ll be back, Lia tries to convince herself. A little patience is something Lia knows about, a little patience is the substance she deals in.

Hence Lia’s theory of transposition. It happened so fast; one week, two weeks, four weeks have gone by since Jasmeet left town. Lia is biking now along Bloor Street, going east, no hands, her coat is open like a sail. It’s Jasmeet’s bike. She’s keeping it. She doesn’t stop for traffic lights. Choruses of car horns follow her. At each block she becomes someone else, some other part of who she might be. One block she’s carrying flowers, one block she has newspapers. At the university she thinks of cadavers and at the museum an emptiness swaddles her. Then the naked mannequins in the posh shops embrace her at Bay. At Yonge the perennial
road and construction crews offer her graves that will open annually.

Lia knows Jasmeet won’t return. Not to this spot, she won’t. So this hanging on has been really her refusal to admit her loss. It’s just that she can’t believe it. Jasmeet had called her on the way to Pearson Airport, then she’d called her from the airport before boarding the plane. And then the last call, two days and ten hours later from Cuzco. Since then, no call, no text.

It’s her own fault. Jasmeet had tried to convince her—she could have gone with her but she’s tied by the ankles to this city. Tied to her brother, Germain, and her strange mother, Mercede. So Jasmeet left. That’s not why Jasmeet left for Peru. No. She left to find a desert, she said, to find quiet, and to journey on ayahuasca.
They say the desert is the quietest sound in the world, taking ayahuasca leads you to a pure-intentioned love. I understand
, she’d said when she phoned from Cuzco,
I don’t blame you. We all have our paths, Lia. I feel the earth breathe here, and energy, so much good energy. Your qi is blocked
, Jasmeet told her,
there is a negative energy hovering around you. Everyone has to love themselves. You can’t believe it here, each moment is sacred
. Lia heard the desert in the ear of the cell phone. She heard the quiet that Jasmeet heard then Jasmeet rang off.

The hallway fills now with Lia’s regret. If you came to her door, you would be blown against the opposite wall with the force of this regret. Lia jitters on the doorstep of Jasmeet’s locked room, she has the keys but she doesn’t tell Mrs. Cho. So no carpenter will bring his tool belt and tool kit to the room for weeks yet. And no desperate student will view the room—the paint splatter, the unwashed dishes, the clothes on the floor mixed with hammers and paint, and fabric with globs of dried dye. All these are remnants of Jasmeet’s performance pieces, her interpretations of Oshun, the goddess of beauty; Kali, the goddess of wrath; Bellona, the goddess of war. Jasmeet was interested in goddesses. Jasmeet was
on a path away from corporate shit
, she’d said.