Savage (20 page)
Not much had changed in two years of deliberations: Erik insisted that he was not lying anymore but conceded that he did not want to spend the rest of his life in jail. When the verdict was handed down near the end of March, a journalist noted that Erik and Lyle did not react in any way, no tears, and that they did not look at each other at any point.
I was crashing on Dad's couch for the time being, trying to plan my next move. Over the last two years, I had played all my drama cards, and the house was sold, and I'd slept in spare rooms and couches. His couch was no different; the pills I was taking at the time cradled me in a silent funk, and my animosity turned into a numb feeling of rigor mortis and melancholy.
Fighting him seemed so far off, a distant time that only served to make me permanently homeless and insane: in my pharmacy-enhanced stupor, realizing there was no long-term home, couch or comfort, my battle turned inward. Why would I throw him down on the ground for another stomp when I'd already lost the war? I slurred a few words in repetitive whirlpool prophecy, until the pills and the counter all blurred into one big blob of pink or orange.
Holly moved in with Mom in a new two-bedroom condo-like co-op building near Mount Pleasant and Eglinton, and Dad moved into a one-bedroom apartment on top of a funeral home. For the past year, I had been getting medical notes and testimonials from the loom of my greatest mental health hits in order to somehow ensure a successful academic trip to Concordia. One semester in and I was panicking, dropping courses and trying to get out of another academic mess. It was as if I was building a case for how impossible going to school was for me. It ended up costing me more money in student loans, personal setbacks and undermined my confidence from day one of classes. I felt like I was a mythological character: left on the university doorstep at twenty-one with a bundle of preordained excuses and conditions, highly choreographed on medical stationary.
24
24. “He also gives the impression of being under stress and lacks concentration. Parents have therefore requested a psychological assessment to determine Nate's present functioning and suitability of the French program for him. A screening for emotional factors was also included as part of the psychological assessment. This indicated that Nate may be generally dependent on others. Although he was able to make up positive resolutions to problem situations, often someone else took the major action to resolve the problem. There was also a significant number of expressions of anxiety in Nate's stories. On the sentence completion, Nate expressed communication difficulties between parents and himself, which may possibly be the source of some of his anxiousness and signs of stress seen at school. In the interview with Mrs. Moore following the assessment, his mother confirmed that there is difficulty at home around communication issues with Nate. Nate is a twelve-year-old boy in the French Immersion program who was found to have near high-average intellectual functioning on the WISC-R with strengths in abstract reasoning in visual-spatial skills. On standardized achievement tests, his scores were generally in the average range, although he needed extra time to complete the reading test. An emotional screening gave indication of possible dependency, anxiety and communication problems at home.” (January 7, 1987, East York Board of Education, Dept. of Psychology)
Dad had just come back from the hospital after slipping at a beer store while returning some empties. After being hospitalized and having minor hip surgery, he said he was in the process of suing the store for damages. The whole thing had been caught on surveillance footage, and he had a lawyer who was reviewing his case. Dad had a pin inserted in his upper thigh. I visited him once at the hospital, but all he did was complain about not being able to smoke. He showed me his scar and talked about the procedure in gross detail, as if he had performed the surgery himself.
The semester at university in Montreal, my alleged academic comeback, had been nothing but drama, money wastage and sabotage. I had started doing the paperwork to salvage something, to stop the money drain, to make sense of it all, to cover my bases. If they gave out degrees based on how to get your marks erased because you were mentally ill, I'd have received two BAs by this point.
The head psychiatrist at the school's heath services summed it up in a medical letter mailed to Dad's apartment earlier in the week:
Nate has asked me to summarize the treatment he received at Heath Services while he was a student at Concordia. He has specifically requested that information be provided regarding the dates of his first and last visits, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and behaviour/demeanor. Nate was first seen at Health Services on September 12, 1995. He last came on December 5, 1995. His symptoms included unusual psycho-motor behaviour, thought disorganization, delusions, and auditory hallucinations that disrupted his sleep. These symptoms were consistent with a psychotic disorder and significantly impaired his academic functioning. He was prescribed Trilafon and Cogentin. He also continued to take lithium, which he had been prescribed in the past. He was briefly hospitalized in October 1995 and treated with Haldol. He did not return for follow-up after December, and it was later learned that he had returned to Toronto. Trusting this is satisfactory...
*
A week ago, our Aunt Amy (Dad's other sister) had rehashed a family-centric article in the
Toronto Star
, and the clipping was still crisp on Dad's coffee table, the same gruesome table that we had bounced each other of off at least three times. The newspaper story, spearheaded by my estranged Aunt Amy (herself now, like her father, an Anglican minister). My only recollections of her in the last ten years were her floating around sparse family gatherings all Holy, ghoulish and thunderbolts, bouncing theories off Grandfather about Jesus's intent or Joseph's fluorescent leather jacket, her chalky, tight, high-pitched voice arguing and slicing away at the gravy-filled air while the rest of us recoiled in itchy Sunday-best horror.
I watched Dad pace back and forth with a long great ash on his cigarette. The article brought forth what he had wanted so badly to forget from that dark-cloud year, 1968. In addition to new testimonials from the past, the article included several long passages from the original article, including the trial and news wires that ate up the controversial scandal.
"Want to watch something?" Dad asked me, moving in what I perceived as slow-motion across the hallway towards the small green phone he had plugged into a half-stripped wall. Dad loved renovating, continuously refurbishing a wall or piece of wood, always leaving bits of the places he lived in with a sense of vulnerability, of incompleteness.
Though I couldn't articulate the words because I was pilled, I tried mumbling something.
"I haven't felt this bad since my fiancée died," Dad told me, awkwardly pulling a tallboy from the refrigerator and plucking it open.
Dad walked past the stove, and I gazed at the kettle's slow resolve, its unhealthy sound as it came to a boil. How hollow and weak the metal sounded.
Up until a few days ago, he had been studying for a final exam to become a funeral director.
With those words, "
I haven't felt this bad
..." it became perhaps the first time I had ever heard him utter a sentence detailing an inward sentiment, devoid of physical or temporal properties or public inquiry into the location of shoes, socks, lawnmower, weed pick, coffee, person or condiment).
Where's my shoe, what's for dinner, where is Diane, where are my keys, the newspaper, the Visa bill, the car, the letter from Grandfather, your sister's postal code
...
Dad lit another cigarette.
"I can't take the test again; that was my last shot," he said, running his index figure along his cheek.
During my academic and mental uncertainty, Dad's apartment had become frequent destination for strong tea and long weak cigarettes; the two of us would eat together once a week, even grabbing a drink after one of his earlier dead man shifts once in a while.
I saw a vulnerable bicep deflating under his weak cotton arm, a set of unsettling eyebrows, unkempt for years, and his hair getting grey on fast-forward. A weakening man, caught in his own loquacious storm.
I was witnessing Dad's transportation to a time that predated my own mortal coil, that predated our own family's origins to this time before Diane Shaw dropped her last name, before Holly was born (1972) or Benji the cat reigned supreme (1970â1985), before any of us were ever photographed, imprisoned in celluloid glaze.
The array of pink pills I'd been popping all evening gave me a sick feeling all over. I staggered into the kitchen, wearing one of Dad's blazers and a paisley tie, a fuzzy toque, my hair curling out from the sides, the Epivals swimming hard in my blood, downed every few minutes with an anti-anxiety chaser.
Who was this fiancée, someone before Mom? Why hasn't he ever said anything aboutâHolly said something about an accident, before
âmy face unshaven, raw, occasional pimples thwarted only by my itchy, uneven beard.
"I got too nervous," Dad said, summing up the reality. I made a wheezing noise. He continued. "I may be able to take it in a year's time, but I have to talk to the Dean to reapply."
"Shit," I said, my mouth a gauze of spit that felt foamy and at once dry, imaginary. He stubbed out his cigarette.
"That sucks."
"I'm going out for a minute. Want anything?"
I shook my head. "Naw." I had had more than enough. A strange buzzing sound filled my head now as I glanced into a tall jar of pasta, spaghetti, the translucent red jar, the same one from our house on Glenvale. "Be right back," Dad said, shuffling down the narrow stairwell into the guts of the funeral home.
I found three more pills and swallowed them, lit a cigarette and went outside onto Dad's balcony, noticing a neighbour walking up the metal stairwell. She was asking me some questions, when I realized I couldn't comprehend words. Into the charcoal night I broke through my silver breath, destroying the temporary poltergeist I made by breathing. I made my way back into the apartment, now fully controlled by my own chemical roulette.
I stood at the small kitchen sink, pawed at the dirty dishwater, witnessing plump noodles floating in the dirty soap suds. My tongue was animated, thick and heavy. The tips of my fingers tingled, seeking out more Epival, that sweet pink shrapnel. Two stray ones sparkled on the mauve carpet, and I downed them.
I moved my maelstrom towards the cluttered dining-room table, replete with text books and binders strewn across the pink tablecloth.
"Hello?" Dad said.
"Hi," I answered. I began to pour the pills out in a big pink train on the kitchen counter.
"I bought some chips if you'd like some," Dad said from the living room.
Twelve pills bright and pink. I spoke into my micro-recorder: "I'm going to do it, I have to do it, I um, I gotta, I have to," my speech lubricated with drool and a veritable buffet of snarls and warbles, now permanent on the tape.
I circled the dining-room table, covered in a sheet and full of paint chips, and knocked several flash cards over in the process. As I picked them up, my eyes fell on the alien terminology, as if a new language had invaded us:
Adaptive Funeral Rite: a funeral rite that is adjusted to the needs...4. Egalitarian: Male and female have equal rights, duties...14. Enculturation (Socialization): The method by which social values are internalized...5. Humanistic Funeral Rite: a funeral rite that is in essence devoid...8. Neo-traditional Funeral Rite: a funeral rite that deviates from the normal...18. Rite: any event performed in a solemn and prescribed...9. Social Stratification: categorization of people by money, prestige...Canopic jars used by the Egyptians; four jars
â
My vision was now runny pink and clumpy, an uneven pie smear. Objects were melting and reforming, and a raging black silhouette was continually trying to blanket my turbulent peripheral.
The pills swam, and everything now had a thickness. My head was ticking and I stopped hearing.
I imagined Mom at home, pacing with nervous agitation, her face poised on the brink of tea or toast, sighing eternally, chewing on something while speaking to Holly or Dad, her voice crumbling into the receiver.
I felt my stomach break in half, parts of me leaking, possibly soiling myself. I let out a soft cry as if had God abandoned me forever.
I saw Mom waving her hands across an overheated bagel as it entered her mouth, the phone ringing, and her choking, not taking the time to finish the chew before answering the third ring. With toasted dough lodged in her molars, she would let out the newsfeed to Holly.
"I overdosed," she might have said, half-choking on her food. "I mean, Nate overdosed," Mom switched gears, her coughing fit creating a temporary lull in tone.
"When?" Holly asked.
"Just now. Your father took him to the hospital," Mom might have said, her slippers scuffling along the tiles.
I half-imagined all this from my pink netherworld tomb. "Just now, he overdosed, he's asleep at the hospital."
My skull was clean against the ambulance slab, immovable; a gurney, and finally a bed: Her only son, the only son of her nuclear family. These were the molecules, the sounds, the aroma of a life vanishing, left unkempt, left to my own useless devices. A dash of autopsy ingredients, an obituary in rehearsal: my actions explained nothing, except that I was hopeless and autobiographical.
My nightly self-lust, self-destruct setting was enhanced by the chemical roulette: a swan song only I could hear.
God had died inside me.
I woke up strapped to the thin sliver of a hospital bed. The mattress was firm and a bit moist.
"You peed all over me," the nurse said, as I came into consciousness. I eyed the plastic straw.
"Sorry," I said, mouth swollen and dry.
"And you bit me," she said, blurring off in a shade of white I had never seen before.