The Adjustment League (8 page)

I order a three-dollar cup of Red Rose to claim a seat. Food for a day and a half. Ken groaning in his sleep somewhere
.
Leave it untouched. I've had enough for one night.

Before long another lonely guy barnacles to me. The Face draws some types like a centerfold's. Someone who's been there. Or with no choice but to listen. Starts right in on the atrocities of his ex-wife, this super-bitch, not divorced yet but she's lawyered up, separation papers coming out his ass already… continuous war crimes of this cunt, sorry but no other word for some of them, not the girl I married or maybe it was hell we were both kids… working my balls off for her and the boys, ten years fifteen twenty, and all of a sudden it's sheer neglect if I relax for a few hours gaming, it's fucking adultery,
psychic
adultery I guess, when she finds an online porn payment on the card… little titty site, tame, I drop in at the end of the day who'm I sposed to get it from,
HER?
… but no, her skinny ass is stomping up and down stairs at the thought of it, suitcases, clothes in Glad bags, screaming and crying the twins trying to do their geography project… but wait, here's the punchline, it turns out—she's so fucking over the top she can't stop herself from screaming it—she's
fucking this guy
… so lonely I
drove
her to it…
right
… she's out banging a live asshole while I'm at home in the office one hand on my mouse and
she's
the one being
neglected?
… keeps telling me I need to get a lawyer, apparently they're Siamese twins one can't talk unless it's attached to another… greedy whining selfish supercunt, she'll be sorry when I do…

It takes a long time to get through, and we never leave the one chapter. A man spinning in a small whirlpool of shit, reporting all he sees. But relaying it slow, jerky, piecemeal—it comes at me in variable chunks and speeds, depending on the screens. Full-face Uzi bursts when they go to commercial, dribbling out the side of his mouth when the play sputters midfield or between the blue lines, stopping entirely for a big play or goal, roaring and slamming his hand on the table, his home life incinerated in his joy. Then back to me after the replay…

“How about you?” He juggles half a beer down his throat. “You got a warm one waiting to welcome you home tonight? What's your story, man?”

Some ear-benders, the cannier kind, will share the stage at strategic moments when a sixth sense tells them it's time. Surrender a quarter of the airtime to hog the rest and make it last longer. His shit eddy will still be there.

The tea has little whorls of gray oil on its surface, roughly concentric spirals as if droplets of the burger grease have settled and aligned to simulate a Caribbean storm forming on the Weather Channel. I pick it up, it smells like a gym bag. Set it back down.

“What's my story?”

Let him have it. Has worked so far tonight.

“I've no idea who or what my parents were. I went from home to home as a kid. Foster parents coping as long as they could or would, then passing me on. Some good people. Some the other kind.

“I dropped out of school halfway through Grade Eleven. About two years too late probably. Bad moods, fights. The first of what I called spells—what shrinks call fugue states, I learned later. Being someplace and not knowing how I'd got there. Minutes missing at first. Then hours. All the storms I conjured as a kid—people shouting and screaming and crying, me among them—were sideshows to what was really brewing. I only realized a long time later. Maybe ways to let a bit of it out, maybe just ways to forget for a few thrashing moments—who knows? After school I lived on the streets and people's couches where I could find them. Lots of drugs, it goes without saying. Stints in detention, hospitals. The first treatments: A to L, let's say. I don't really remember that much. A couple of dozen scenes standing in for several years. The spells getting longer. Plus the drugs. The last of my foster parents finally packed it in. Good people, who wouldn't let themselves off the hook. I was twenty-one, a legal adult. Childhood was over.”

Marital Breakdown is staring at me with a stunned, solemn expression. Like a beef cow grazed by the bolt. Maybe it's my flat delivery that's throwing him, so different from the melodrama he's spewing. Deadpan synoptic swathes to his shitspin. But they're made for different purposes, our stories. I settled on my five-stage potted bio a long time ago. Five paragraphs that don't change, lashed together to make a raft in heavy seas. Like someone charged with crafting an encyclopedia entry, I assembled what I knew beyond question in my head. Cut out anything extraneous or debatable. Just the facts, Jack. I don't need to hype my story, just keep it straight. I give him till the end of the next chapter to make his exit.

“Next came the Hurricane Years. Fifteen years, or one minute repeated over and over. The same scenes looping—different actors, different sets. Longer lock-ups, no longer a juvenile. And hospitals: M to Z, then start from A again. Every kind of temporary room. Short-term jobs as janitor, dishwasher, coat-check attendant. Then subsidized positions, Goodwill the longest. Then full disability—the 5 circled at the top of the list. A lot of travel mixed in at times. To Europe, parts of Asia, Mexico, Costa Rica. Big enough winds blow you everywhere. Sometimes on a girlfriend's dime. But I'd learned to save like a demon—my most unquestioned skill to this day. And most places are cheap if you're willing to live rough.”

“Hold that thought, can you?” he says, right on cue. Soft pink palm up, gold wedding band. “I've got to take a wicked shit.”

And he's gone, hitching up his cords, for the back stairs. He got fixated during the Hurricane Years on a particular patch of my right forehead. The scars are a palimpsest, one coming forward from the mix one time, another time another, but I knew what was trapping his gaze just now, it used to trap mine when I still did mirrors, before I learned to shave and brush seeing just the patch under repair. A hashtag, faint but deep, once you spot it it keeps coming at you. Like a tic-tac-toe grid cut on a diagonal into flesh. Though the truth is far stranger.

The table peaceful, spacious, with the departure of my woman-hating wanker. Bobbing beneath the colours and the roar. And relief to know his wicked shit will be long if not eternal. Otherwise I'd have to edit the next, the shortest-softest-strangest of my phases. And prepared texts don't take to editing, they buck and buckle at it.

I prefer telling it to the oil atop the rocking tea. Taking all the time I need.

The Island. A place of magic and stability, as all islands first appear. Looming from choppy seas. Settling some. Age? Finding—and keeping—a shipper-receiver job at an art store. Lois the weekend framer, a painter finishing OCAD. Twelve years younger. Her family old money—old and new. And smart. Smart enough not to kick at the connection, figuring it would run its course.
A nice enough guy, rough edges but treats her well I guess—still, I mean… Give her time…
A solid plan. But then Megan came along. Unplanned, unprevented. Lois weathering the blunt force advisories at family dinners, chin set. And then the turnaround: deposit on the apartment. A year later, Megan almost walking, the down payment on the house. Smart again, midnight discussions:
we're not going to lose our only child and grandchild
. All sealed with a kind of party trick. Jordan bringing out his old LSAT prep books after a dinner—a running joke, a ghost plan, that one day Lois would pack up the easel and join him in the firm. Megan gurgling, Lois tending to her, while I—subbing in, a good sport—run through the sections without a miss. Pop-eyed stares from Jordan, Melanie. The schooled with no conception of what omnivorous constant reading—in freight elevators stopped between floors, in coffee shops, in cells—can accomplish. Cut to first semester at U of T's Bridging Program. Everything holding steady on the Island. Bringing home the A+s with only a modicum of effort. Rather relishing my status as a find, a project, Jordan's outright merriment, like the guy who pried up an old floorboard out of boredom and found the jewels. Infectious, the delight. Like a speed habit gaining. By October, less prep and less sleep necessary for the same results. Amazement all around. By November, almost no sleep and definitely no prep or attendance needed—all energy redirected to much more pressing private research in the stacks. Independent initiatives. Which both subsume and trivialize the mandated syllabus. Don't worry, be happy! Bridge? I'll show you a bridge. And poor Lois with not much better luck with the parents—too ensconced in the fantasy train to feel the bump to another track.

And out, into the chill and burger fug, before he can return.

§

Back at the ranch.

Fuddling around the living room. On the couch, off. Reading. Checking out the window, Eglinton still there. Stretches on the floor—keep the joints usable, maybe tire out the body. One of those nights. Sleep not coming soon if at all.

That is not what killed my mother. Not who. What.
Talking about a suspicious death in the usual sense, the police sense? Judy gone everyday-procedural?

No, it won't be that simple.

So you hope and pray
.

In Big Empty, I arrange the artifacts from Maude's room along the front wall, propping them at intervals against the baseboard below the window. Photos—fall walk, family dinner. Bobby pins, clippers. “Christmas Music” on the USB. The box itself.

You should have brought the balled-up nylon.
Not part of the picture.

Wrong. How can you know until you see it?

Max's card. Also, the box-framed single monarch wing. Fished out of a carton just before Strongbacks started loading. An unconventional memento. And the first of Judy's talismans.
A single wing.
Half a migration? Half a metamorphosis?

I sit cross-legged in the middle of the room. Not a posture I can maintain long. Back, knees. Letting the objects fill the space and say what they have to say.

Which is nothing yet. They don't have anything to say. Or voice to say it with.

I lie down on my back and try it that way. Eyes closed.

Same result. Nothing yet.

Your mission, Mr. Phelps, should you decide to accept it—

My teammates: a brainsick girl and her dead mother.
You've had worse.

As usual, this tape will self-destruct in five seconds…

§

Joy the enemy. Joy the culprit.

It happened in a moment of wild dancing. A burst of savage euphoria that just had to share itself.

And did.

By next afternoon the apartment half cleaned out, their presences amputated cleanly, the stump disinfected with a note.
I don't blame you, but what you are is too dangerous to be close to. I wish you well. Please don't try to contact us.

I have to run very fast to stay ahead of it. Slowing or stopping, softness of any kind, brings it a step nearer. Images start to crowd me, splicings of memory and nightmare. Things that must have happened, could never have happened.

Shrivelled screaming instants.

§

The views. From the balcony, the good brick wall and dark flashing of the Latimer. The blinking, giant's playnib beside the lake, flicking neon at the clouds. From the window, fire station 135, the bus shelter, EMS. Lights on, doors closed. Good, but not the best. Best is knowing beyond doubt that people are on the job. That they've got your back, even without knowing who you are, and stand ready to make adjustments. And, flipside, the worst: the comatose Sunday mornings, Christmas, Easter, and all Civic Holidays—all those artificial lulls when the city lies on the couch like someone pretending to sleep while keeping one eye open. That's when green tea longs for its departed betters of tequila shots and acid tabs and I stare until my eyes ache at the red doors of the fire station, praying for them to fly open, men in helmets scrambling, praying for the deliverance of a siren and the grill of the big truck in motion.

The discipline. To work in six-to-eight-week windows of gathering rage and speed, followed by a wordless crash. To know the personnel and the conditions of the job site.

Stone:
Learn your windows.

Mixed states my specialty. Acute, jittery alertness combined with steadily darkening mood. Turbid, seething energies: a rage recipe. A car chase on black ice, which ends, as it must, in a crash.

In the aftermath of hyper-black, standard protocol mandates a return to base. That is when I'm most in need of a prolonged debriefing with Stone. And get one, always. The man reliably strange, strangely reliable.

Ah, Stone.
Healer, taskmaster, known enemy, surprising friend. His place of work a confessional crossed with a torture chamber. Hospice fronting a leper colony. I dread my unavoidable visits to him as a man with twisted limbs dreads his visit to the surgeon who must break each bone in order to reset it.

And if the assignment arrives five weeks into the window? Maybe six. Inconvenient—very. A timing problem. Maybe serious.

But a problem. Not a dilemma.

You're
on
the adjustment.

§

On the couch under a blanket. Close my eyes, then open them and watch the gleams from headlights and streetlights flutter up by the glass. The bed a mockery once insomnia sets in to stay. Better odds at surprising sleep out here.

Grind-thoughts of a girl. How old now? With a half-melted face, standing at the edge of a classroom or recess yard—
no, age her dammit
—seminar room, employee lounge. Or girl—
woman!
—with a graft-smoothed face, talking and laughing in a group, knowing that underneath the work of a dozen surgeries she is still half-melted, will always be half-melted.