Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good (12 page)

“Entropy?”

Matt reviewed a movie about this sort of stuff once. Cosmology, they called it—big stuff, but the movie was about a tiny little guy, an English bloke shrunken with Lou Gehrig’s disease. “A grinning pixie or E.T. type,” is how Matt described him—he can still picture the black, batlike wheelchair, the head flopped over to one side, the robotic voice eerily emanating from the speech synthesizer. Again with the questions. Are black holes really black? Can twin black holes merge to make one big black hole? ALS was supposed to kill the chap but instead transformed him from a cranky underachiever into a happy family man and gabby genius. Go figure. Matt wove some sciencey material into his piece—“movies are just photons is all they are, tiny packets of energy bursting on your eyeballs”—but he didn’t particularly understand any of it.

“You know,
entropy,”
says Kate.

“Oh right.”

Kate clucks schoolmarmishly, kids these days. “Disorder?” she says. “Decadence? Everything just keeps falling apart, doesn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

“You comb your hair in the morning, you get it all to go the same way, and by evening?” She takes a swipe at Matt’s mop, or rather broom. “Higgledy-piggledy.”

“Hey,” says Matt. He makes a comb of his fingers and reworks the fine frenzy on his head. It’s only been a couple of hours, actually.

“And that’s entropy, everything decays. Everything, including
everything,
including the whole universe, eventually dies and goes still. Maybe those two things are linked in some way. Maybe they’re the same thing.”

“And this is what you
think
about all day?”

Kate shrugs, smiles. No shortage of teeth. “What do you think about? What are you thinking about right now?”

“My sister,” says Matt, but by the time he says it, it’s a lie. He was thinking about Erin for a moment there—about her amazing, her diamond-tipped mind, into what arcane layers of knowledge it might have drilled—but he’s switched back over now to thinking about Kate. About her eyes, those peepholes into this puzzling new creature, what he might see in there if he could get past the glare. And about her rump.

From behind last night, with her folded over, was it submissive? Compliant? More like calisthenic, is what it felt like. Standing doggie is the technical term—Meg once bought him a book. Mariko never offers him that angle and he’s never proposed it, too anxious with regard to its political implications. Where would such a request—“Bend over, wouldja, honey?”—place him in the entirely unfunny narrative of gender relations? And how does the same position parse when the coupling is male-male? Maybe he’ll ask Zane. Maybe he won’t.

The closest Matt’s ever come is that time with Dr. Damphousse, a first prostate check. Pants around his ankles Matt bent over and braced himself against the examining table, its tissue crinkling beneath his nervous weight. Snap of latex, twist of a jar top—and the guy was inside him. It couldn’t have felt any more queer, any more uncanny if the good doctor had slid a finger a few inches into his ear and prodded his brain’s backside, his cerebellum. Kitchy kitchy koo.

“Your sister? So she’s here in Toronto too?”

“Yeah. No. She’s … she died.”

Again the quick inhalation from Kate—the un-word, the anti-word.

“No, it’s okay. I mean, it was a long time ago.”

Say it’s true, this idea that time only goes one way, that it refuses to back up. Can it be induced to slow down though, to stutter? Some moment of surpassing intensity, could it cause time to stand still? What Matt wants to envision is an instant of romance, of erotic promise or consummation. That first night with Mariko, say—her flesh, her mind, her fleshy mind, the whole wholeness of her. Afternoon actually, a matinee. They couldn’t wait, brought each other off through denim during
Apollo 13,
five, four, three, two, one …

Yep, that’s close, love-sex is close. And death may be even closer. Erin’s death, for instance, that infinitely unforgettable day. He and Meg had had a mega-squabble the night before—“You’re being cold” (Matt), “Yeah well you’re being clutchy” (Meg)—as was the pattern during those days of Erin’s decline. That evening he’d gone out and got himself wasted with a couple of film buddies—no Zane, since he was off exploring the new universe his queerness had recently cracked open for him. When Matt arrived for his morning visit with his sis he was hungover. Not in that cute, comedic way, Andy Capp with his crown of ice cubes, but the other way: totally, traumatically, tragically. Why couldn’t he just
die?
This was the thought on his mind as he crept off the elevator on Erin’s floor at the hospital, wincing once again at the bile green walls. He had a fluffy, four-foot Felix the Cat wedged under his arm—the perfect gift, to Matt, being the perfect non sequitur. He spied his dad outside his sister’s door at the end of the hall, gazing out the TV-sized window over the soot-mottled city. Was there a new stoop, a more definitive slope to the man’s shoulders?

What penetrated Matt at that moment didn’t feel like pain or pleasure but like a precursor to both of those sensations, a primal form of stimulus. Pure voltage. It didn’t kill him but it did cause him, for some period of time, not to exist. During that time no time passed. It still hasn’t, he’s standing there still, he hasn’t budged.

Of the three hundred–odd reviews Matt’s cranked out for
Omega,
all but three have been of real movies, movies that exist. A pretty respectable ratio, to Matt’s mind. Anybody who cares to analyze his work (Matt daydreams a rush of doctoral theses once the scandal really breaks) will note that the fabricated reviews differ from the others in a number of pivotal ways.

For instance, they’re more positive. They’re way more positive. Whereas most of Matt’s reviews are cool, his phony ones are warmly enthusiastic. Whereas his normal reviews are land-mined with words like
cant
and
contrived, vile
and
vacuous, pandering
and
pap,
his faux reviews feature terms such as
sublime, redemptive, epiphany.
In one of the three he over-the-topped-it with the expression
sublime redemptive epiphany,
what the hell. Matt has a rating system designed for him by Mariko, a movie viewer in silhouette sitting upright, or sagging, or slumping, or gone. For the nonexistent movies that homunculus is always erect.

So why didn’t people rush off to find these films? Why didn’t Matt get busted right off the bat—four months ago, say, when he ran that first fake, the crop circle thing?

Matt entertains two possible explanations. The first is that nobody reads his reviews. The thing is, though, he does have a following—a little wee one, but still. Which leaves explanation number two, that nobody
heeds
his reviews. That the movies he praises, most especially the ones he makes up, are of interest to precisely no one.

Here, in fact, Matt has demonstrated an uncharacteristic touch of shrewdness. While most of his reviews take on giant American productions, the movies he creates are little homegrown affairs. Nobody, Matt reasons, ever really expects to have heard of his arcane Canadian art films, his rogue Canadian directors, his raw Canadian stars. And nobody’s surprised that they can’t be found. When Matt’s jig was finally up (just last week, can it be?), Nagy lumped two real Canadian movies in with the three fakes. Sad-funny, funny-sad.

But that last piece, what, did he
want
to get caught? Who, save a goofy enthusiast like DennyD, could possibly have been duped? Matt’s starting to think of himself as one of those lame self-saboteurs who tearfully confess on daytime TV. “I
knew
Natasha was coming home at lunch, I guess I
meant
her to catch me in her leotard …” When he hung up the phone that day, Nagy’s voice still bleating at the other end of the line, Matt reread the review that got him busted. Reread it in print—Nagy had twigged too late.

Okay, Matt had pushed it that time. The not-so-subtle self-reference, for a start. “This film is like a kiss blown to an imaginary lover,” he’d mused in his review. “It’s like a sacrifice to a non-existent God. It’s like a review of some film we’ll never see.” Lordy. And then all the personal, self-reflexive stuff. He’d dubbed the director “Martin McCall” and blessed him with a revolutionary “egghead with an attitude” approach. He’d named the movie
House of Straw,
and encoded his shattered life with little Mariko—“Minnie” in the movie—into the lives of the lead characters.

What with all the fuss, what with her husband getting fired and everything, Mariko up and
read
this review, a practice she’d lately abandoned—not because she’d quit caring, Matt’s pretty sure, but because she still cared too much, found her husband’s ire too alarming. She was amused for a bit by the
House of Straw
piece—“You’ve been
making movies up?
I guess you’ve still got it, buddy”—but then she was irked. “Why wouldn’t you at least tell me about it, share that with me?”

“I’m not comfortable talking about that kind of stuff,” said Matt. “Creative stuff.” Though in fact Zane had been in on it from the start.

“And I suppose that’s me, I suppose Minnie’s me,” said Mariko.
“Lesbian love affair, fruitless womb.”
She ran her eye down the column.
“Flaky faux-Rasta,
that’d be Sophie of course.
Low-rent guru,
is that supposed to be Roshi? My God, Matt.”

And then appalled. She was amused, and then she was irked, and then she was appalled. Fair enough, she’d scored Matt the gig at
Omega
in the first place. “Blowing this job, Matt …” She smacked the splayed paper with the back of her hand. “What’s
up
with you?”

Matt can scarcely bear to think of it but he had a go, that day, at defending himself. He hit Mariko with the whole Great Artist schtick.

“It’s inevitable,” he said—he intoned, almost—“that an art form will ultimately rebel against its subject matter.” Striding about the kitchen he urged her to think of a painter—“your Kandinsky, your Klee”—as he makes his first non-figurative stroke. “He’s in his garret. He’s permitted himself more than his usual thimbleful of schnapps. ‘This isn’t a breast,’ he cries out, ‘this isn’t the belly of a boat. This is a slash of paint. Period. Look, I have line, I have colour, what do I need with your world?’”

It sounded rehearsed, and it was—Matt had been prepping since the day he slipped in that first phony piece. He paused to judge the effect of his performance—and he charged on anyway. “So why should I wait for a movie to exist before I review it? What did Kandinsky say?” He made as if to canvass his memory. “Right,
the content of painting is painting.
And the content of a movie review is a movie review. A signifier without a signified. A finger pointing at no moon.”

Mariko laughed. There was pretty much everything in that laugh, there was pleasure, there was pity, there was pain.
Man,
could that woman laugh.

Matt jams an arm between the clunking-shut doors of the elevator, pries them apart.

“Um, hello?” says Kate.

“I just … I feel like we’re not done yet,” says Matt.

“Oh. Okay.” Not pleased, not pissed off. Open, alert to clues.

This wasn’t the plan. Just minutes ago, back there in the Starlight Lounge, Matt arrived at some firm resolutions. First off he’d wrap up his little chat with Kate, bid her farewell. He’d retreat to his room, crash early, hit the road at dawn refreshed and fever-free. Dawn? Noon at the very latest. He’d get on with it, get refocused on his real agenda, this whole crazy business of talking sense into Zane. Saving the bastard’s life (messiah, much?), maybe saving his own while he’s at it.

To this end he announced to Kate, with some little ceremony—as he drained his third and definitely final pint—that he was married. No mention of the separate bedrooms bit, that’d sort of weaken his point. Not that the revelation seemed to alarm her much anyway. Relieved, is that what she looked? She said, “And you weren’t married last night?”

Hm. “Okay, so how about this—I can’t die without having pulled off at least
one
one-night stand.”

Kate put on a skeptical frown. “Are you saying you’ve
never?”

Matt nodded, spun his coaster like a compass. “It’s just the way I am.”

“Compulsively committed.”

He shrugged.

“Jeez. Even when you were young?”

“Well, there was Hanna and Helena that time in Morocco, but that was three nights.”

Further processing. “Hanna and …?”

“Right, true. So times two, call it six nights. And every other woman I’ve slept with I’ve kept on sleeping with for at least a few years.”

Kate made as if to glower at him. “Don’t you think you should maybe warn a person? If all you’re after is a long-term relationship?”

Matt bobbed his head, sorry.

Kate gave her cap of hair a contemplative scruffle. “Whereas I’m the other way around. I’m not a cheater, I don’t mean that, I just … Child of an alcoholic, that whole business? Sorry, save it for my support group, right? I’m oversharing.”

“Not at all.”

“Yes I am, I do. But it’s kind of crazy, thinking about it.” She gave her big eyes a big roll. “My dad was an addict and that … it changes you. The way I am with men, always overdoing it.” She put up her hands. “But not tonight. Tonight I’m good, tonight I behave. Tonight I toddle off and leave you to sort out your own troubles, no meddling. Good luck with Zane. Good luck with everything. And thanks.”

“Thanks?”

“Thanks.” She gave his hand a parting squeeze. Then she got up and left.

And he went after her. WWZD? Hard to say exactly what Zane would do, but there’s not a chance he’d sit around stewing all night.

Matt’s doing a Moses thing here, holding off the elevator doors like the two halves of a parted sea. “I think we should do something,” he says. “Something fun.”

“Like what?”

Yeah, like what. If they were to go somewhere it’d be a date, and what do you do on one of those? Matt’s mind skitters through time, ends up all the way back in high school. Dancing? Skating? “Bowling,” he says.