The Adjustment League (34 page)

“You lost them long ago. And never sent out a search party. Why, I wonder.”

“I don't follow you. You're not making sense.”

“You follow fine and I'm making perfect sense. You're just a terrible listener. All your family are. Your ears work perfectly, but you take in what you want and flush the rest.”

“My family's ruined,” he says, slurring now, fingers lost and roving in his curls. “Everything's fallen to shit.”

“So start building.”

“Build what? Where?”

“Start with Judy. She's going to need your help. She always has.”

He looks up at me without raising his head, blinking, as if I've said something utterly outlandish.
Judy again? Still?

“Or demolish it. Finish the job. Sometimes you've got to smash things. When the house is rotten all the way through, there's nothing to be salvaged—you've got to take the wrecking ball to it and then dig up the foundation. A clean hole is all you can expect to work with.”

Stillness from his side, the fingers stopped, peering with glazed eyes above the cans and below my face. Jab him with something new.
No, it's too late for this guy
.

“Where's your can? I've got to take a leak.”

Barely moving, the black eyes indicate a short hall past the kitchen.

§

“…a look'n your way pas',” burbles the voice behind me. Is he putting this on? Sober and sparring one moment, near coma the next? No, a veteran drunk, drowning the cells, turning them to pure alcohol, while the mind teeter-treads above, floundering and sinking, then riding a clean board high above the churn. It hasn't been
that
long. Hell, is happening on half a Coors.

This morning's
Globe
on the corner of the kitchen counter, open to the obituaries.

Head and shoulder shots, staring up: the officer in dress uniform, the bride in white.
What you saw that first day at Vivera, the missing heads
. But two hours ago, the poolside pensioners smiling from the
Star
? Two sets of obit pics? Or are you that far along? Past distortion phase, on to full hallucinations?

I can't read well, even worse than earlier. I just pick out scraps, fuzzed space between them. Enough to confirm the usual malarkey, in the usual proportions. The great man's childhood, schooling, service to his country, medical career, service to the community,
honoured by
…
presented with
…
proud to
. Maude's name flitting in and out, her two main appearances near the start—
met the love of his life
—and two-thirds through—
devoted mother to their three children
. And, near the end, before it reverts to him:
courageous battle with
… Like watching a movie with the sound off: just count when people come on, how long they're on for.

Endings matter. Force yourself to focus.

I turn back to Sandor. He looks smaller, slumped behind his moat of cans, me looking down at him.

“‘He died at home, surrounded by his family.' You added that last line, I guess, as some kind of payback. A joke on him.”

“No, he did, believe it or not. He wrote their obituaries and filed them with the funeral home years ago. Tinkered with them probably, like his will. Had individual ones, if they died far apart. And this joint production, with Mom slotted in around him. He always thought he could control everything, even his own end. I think it had something to do with putting people to sleep for forty years. But I left the line in. No, not quite as payback.” He muses, seeming to go somewhere distant and come partway back. “But I guess to show how wrong I think he was.”

“Wrong about?”

“Always knew something was off—wrong—about my father. Something about women. People in general, but especially women.”

True enough, but I don't trust Sandor's fleeting epiphanies. He lacks the guts—the cornered need, if there's a difference—to stick with anything, even a valuable truth he's discovered.
The baby of the family. Arriving late on the scene. Overlooked. Spoiled.

Standing there, sighting through swirling grains, I see yet another version of the dark bulk in the gloom. It comes over me in an instant, a new account of those turbid, roiling eyes. Not grief, not guilt and shame—not just—but something more like embarrassment. Embarrassment and lifelong pique. He sicced me on his older brother and father, or acquiesced in Lynette doing so—not to avenge his discarded mother, not for money (which Max will hardly be able to spend, or at least control so well, from jail)—but to get out from under their thumbs. To stop being the baby, the overlooked one. Even Judy more respected in a weird way, at least for her power to disrupt. The thing surfacing in his eyes: the look of sly guilt and fright in a little boy who lights matches and then sees the flames spreading beyond his control. Panic of mischief gone amok.

Past childhood, an accusation not an excuse
.

Time to find the bathroom and finish this.

§

During the flush, I open the cupboard under the sink. Find, on one side, Comet and Drano, about twenty bars of Dove from some sale. Next to them—hello. A stash like I found in another brother's pad. But concentrated here, two small half shelves in the dark, not spread out as in the official home. Nothing to contradict—at least not to eyes not too prying—the filthy razor and hair-laced soap bar on the sink.

Bag of cotton puffs. Curling iron, cord twist-tied. Make-up case. Mirror. Creams and ointments. Lancôme in gold letters on a little mauve obelisk. Other swishy names.

One ship going down, jump to another? Or keep passage booked on both of them—who knows what the high seas will bring? Or just—a periodic return to home port? The old man's “disappointment” in his youngest, their long estrangement. Sandor a lazy athlete, he sneered. But not so lazy as a ladies' man. Unless finding your first at home counts as sloth.

The thoughts trail off, I can't follow them long. It's not just closing window fatigue. More like built-up toxicity from prolonged exposure to the Wyverns. Their cold congealed sleaze—like staring at a plate of yesterday's spaghetti crawling with roaches. I've never felt it on an adjustment before. Disabling exhaustion, sure, many times, the last steps performed as if underwater.

But not this sheer disgust swamping me, oozing like cold black gel between me and the targets.

Adjustments have ended badly for lots of reasons. Never by out-repulsing me.

I close the cupboard door and rise on creaking knees to check the medicine cabinet.

Pills. A lot of them. Bottles and bottles. I flush the toilet again, run the water while I bring them out of the cabinet. Antidepressants, a couple of kinds, doctors' names on the newer ones with drugstore labels. Sedatives, various benzodiazepines. Scrips with lots of latitude: 1-3 pills at bedtime, enough for three months, a couple of repeats. Older pills, or at least older bottles, behind them. No labels, or scurf of labels torn away. Pink pills. Yellow pills. Orange pills. Beige ones. No names on any of them.
Lots of obliging doctors. Two less now though
. I peer at one pill, then another. They're just colours.

No way to tell, really. I take what I think I'll need.

§

Go back in, take my seat. Sandor doesn't look surprised when I set the pill bottle on the table in front of me. Take my cutter out of my pocket, open the blade with a
snick
. He doesn't look remotely drunk either. He watches me alertly from his corner, his mouth looking like it wants to smile. The eyes black and baleful, far past grief.

“Is this the part where you use your knife, make me swallow a bottle of my own pills? Force me to tell you what you think I know. Make me do something. Sign something.
Take care of Judy
,” he says mincingly.

“No, you goddam pussy. This is where I show you the easy way out and see if you follow form and take it.”

“Ah, right. Follow my goddam family down. People would believe it.”

A caving in my head. Like an anthill collapsing, sand and tiny scrambling bodies. Except it keeps going on.
Not an event. The way it is
.

I swallow the first handful of pills to stop seeing it. Uncap the bottle and tap half a dozen into my palm, swallow them with what's left of the Coors. Open another can.

“What the fuck?”

Shake another handful into my palm. Pause. Cock my head, trying to catch up to what's happening. There was something else, another plan, I'm sure of it, but whatever it was, if it was, it's whooshing into the past like a bullet train and I can't catch it now. The new thing that replaced it is waiting, just ahead, for me to catch up to it. When I do, my lips will move and sound will come out of them.

I swallow the pills with a long chug of Coors.

“Stop! That's enough! We can talk. I'm not gonna let you do this.” But he doesn't get up, doesn't move except to raise his hands. This dance is paralyzing him.

I shake out another handful.

“HOLD IT! You can't do this here!”

“Lynette and your book have got me half-believing you've got a heart. The start of one anyway. Now we're going to see if you've got any balls to go with it. A heart without balls is nothing but a curse in this world. You're Exhibit A on that score.”

I still don't know what I'm doing, can't go fast enough to catch up to it. I barely hear what I'm saying, though I follow it and it sounds like me. What I know: I
am
the adjustment.

Down go the pills. Fifteen or more in me now.

“Now
listen
. We can talk. We can go somewhere, talk to someone. This is
not
happening. You can't just come in here and off yourself. It's too fucking crazy. Way too fucking crazy. You're crazy if you think—”

“Of course I am. So is Judy. You're so busy cataloguing your own blues, you can't see conditions that make yours look like hiccups. Not even when they're right in front of your face. You think you've come close to the edge? Touched the void? You haven't gone near it.”

My voice high in my ears, climbing toward shrill near the end.

Not my voice. Crazy for real.

I ready the next handful, take a gulp of beer and a deep breath before swallowing them. I want to get the next part out clearly while I can. Make sure he gets it all.

“You've got two choices. You can let me die here, which will take me out of your hair for good but will also give you something difficult to explain. At a time when your family's doing nothing but explaining. How did a man happen to O.D. in your home, in front of your eyes, without you stopping him? Or you can do the safe thing—call it in—which is going to keep me in your life, knowing the secrets of your filthy family, badgering you to take care of Judy. I'm betting you'll pick safe, for all its aggravations, but you're weak enough and privileged enough, with just enough dumb cunning, to feel you might just want to take a chance and clear the slate. But understand this: if I wake up, I'm hounding you until Judy gets her due. You know me enough to know I won't stop. If I'm here tomorrow I'm on your case.”

He sits there, shocked. Mouth and eyes sex-doll wide. I swallow the handful. Then two fistfuls after it, enough to make me gag a bit, even sloshing down beer.

The bottle's empty.

Sit there, waiting. For the second time in three days, I feel myself beginning to go numb, my head emptying and coldly fizzing from Wyvern drugs, while a Wyvern watches me quizzically.
Not the drugs, not yet. Though it means the drugs will work even faster
. Christ, how I hate their faces: Max, Vivian, Sandor, that ancient ghoul… Judy too. Just for ridding me of the sight of them, death will be a blessing.

Not here
. Another plan forming. Still catching up to it.

I stand up.

“What're you doing? What's going on?” Sounding panicked, boyish.
Hey, guys, wait up. Gu-ys!

“I'm leaving. I need to get home.”

“Wait.” He reaches the door as I do, grabs my wrist. I stare down at the hand encircling me. It's enormous: these massive fingers, black wires coiling from them. He removes it.

I slide the door open. Step out into cool air, sunlight. Turn back.

Sandor in smudgy dark. This huge mess, staring back at me. Petrified.

“Do you eat other animals?” I say, and slide the door closed.

§

“Good girl,” I say to Daisy, still hunkered in the shade. Something I don't recall ever saying before, I'm not a dog person. Not a pet person in any sense. Cage creatures for cuddling? If she comes at me I have my blade ready.

§

Walking down Shields. Walking slower than I should. My legs rubbery, not quite there. Gliding a hair above the sidewalk. Faraway dark oblongs make slow-motion leaps across the cracks, land fizzing on the square beyond. That long moving walkway they used to have at Spadina, transferring people from one line to another. Some strode beside it, impatient: when they matched its pace you both stopped moving and just hung there, side by side. Some people walked on the belt, adding muscle to machine, brief superheroes. But most just let themselves be carried along. Moving without moving. Horizontal balloons. Sailing…

Right at Crestview. Then the jog, past which the sidewalk disappears. Curb and grass. Crossing Castlewood. Lynette up there. Crying. Phoning. Doing the dishes to distract herself. Giving up, hammering on his door. Crying.

All just the same. Exactly equivalent ways of doing exactly the same thing
.

Things look large and wonderful.
En
larged. Their outlines sharp, their colours rich and so deep.

Also faraway. Behind something. Like things coated in clear plastic.
Paperweights. Souvenirs.