The Adjustment League (9 page)

And Lois. Really, forgiveness in her heart? Is there? Could there be?

Stirred in with thoughts of the city.

Something wrong, the streets unnaturally still.

Can't sleep.

And then, the first light spooling into dark, I hear the sirens and I can.

5

“What kind of
funds are we talking about?”

“Nine hundred dollars will do it, I think.”

A tiny pause. “Same as last time, then,” Ken says. Less gets by him than he pretends.
Anything over a thousand, make me itemize it.
What I insisted on at the start.

“Different situation. But yes, about the same costs.”

“And you feel yourself to be of sound mind?” Ken getting it out quickly, not comfortable even after all these years with asking such a thing, though the question is my own and I wouldn't give him my business unless he agreed to it.

“I do.”

“And it's something you've considered carefully. Reviewed over a period of time.”

A short time.
“I have.”

“All right, then.”

I now pronounce you manic and funds.

The money will be in my bank tomorrow, Wednesday morning at the latest. Same account my regular remit goes into—$800, two days before the end of each month. Half for rent, the Owner's top-up, and half for food, gas and other sundries. A maintenance dose. Money methadone, to keep the cells this side of screaming. And coverable, on average, from a conservative investment portfolio, not touching the principal. Leaving aside a little extra
for the unforeseen
. Ken double-checking on his calculator that first meeting, but doing most of it in his head.

“Keep well,” he says before hanging up.

“Sorry, that suite's taken. Hanging in might still be available.”

No dry chuckle this time. “Stay safe, my friend.”

Stay safe, my friend
. Making another coffee in the French press snagged at Goodwill, I consider it. Banker's bonhomie in another mouth, but not in Ken's I don't think. Not just that. Though we meet barely once a year, neither of us could forget our first encounter. Lifting the lid on my life to let him peep at the roiling. I needed to scare him to gain his full attention. Let him know exactly what he was dealing with. His eyes widened, the MBA part of his soul wanted to run. But the concern he added, then and now, seemed his own. Seems genuine.

Two months after discharge, still lying about the half-empty apartment. Mind blank as sand, hours passing without event, as I moved from chair to bed to chair again. Spring happening unnoticed beyond the windows. Bringing myself slowly off the haze of ward drugs, halving the dosages, quartering them a few days later. Jordan's cheque still uncashed. Anxious messages from him, mutterings of “expiry dates,” the danger of funds “in limbo.” Even an icy reminder from Lois, Jordan looming inaudibly behind her. But I needed to know. Or needed to be sure of what I already knew. I wouldn't work again. The hodgepodge of half-jobs and charity placements that had sustained me for two decades was done. At a stroke on a December evening, real winter had begun, and I was no longer work material. That was beyond question. The only question was how to live the time that remained on Jordan's payout.

Stretching a sum that was huge if life was a day, a week, a month. Modest if it was years. But if the life dragged on for decades—as even impossible lives were known to do?
Live on two hundred grand a year—hey! Live off it forty years—oh oh.
The only alternative would be declaring—or trying unsuccessfully to hide—my atrocity windfall, Social Services suspending my disability pension (with clawbacks for the assets hidden), then burning through the whole amount, leaving me, one fine day, a broke mental patient in his mid- to late-forties. No job, no income, no hope—a perfect zero.

Psychosis doesn't come with a pension plan. And death's the only mandatory retirement.

“You need to know everything to be of use to me. I'm a pretty strange case,” I said, that first day in Ken's office.

“Every person's situation is unique,” he replied. I let that go. Ken was better than that. He'd better be. What I'd told him so far simply wasn't dire enough. An edited version that would sober him without frightening him off. An ex paid by wealthy in-laws to vanish couldn't shock a banker. Megan might, but she would never come into it.

“I'm severely ill, Ken. I've worked in the past, but I'm unemployable now. That door's closed.”

“You seem pretty lucid to me.” Straightening his tie, then bringing his eyes back up to mine. A suspicion that I might be able to trust him after all beginning to germinate. I could feel its tendrils, thin as hairs, somewhere under my breastbone.

“Seeming lucid is what I do. And can almost always do. It's how I get by.”

“Surely there must be some treatments… I've known people who… … depression makes a poor advisor…” I let him go on murmuring these bromides, which in ninety of a hundred cases might be true or partly true, because I knew he needed to get them out of his system.

“Ken, I wouldn't be sitting here if I hadn't tried everything. Riding a broken merry-go-round and dreaming of the high plains isn't hopeful, it's dumb. Especially if the plastic ponies are booby-trapped.”
Just confusing him now. No metaphor
. “Now, I need you to tell me what, on average, you can make two hundred thousand dollars bring in a month.”

“I can do that. But I'll tell you before I do, it won't be enough to live on. Not even close. Especially not in Toronto.”

“I'll make it be enough.”
Arrangements.
And hitting me, belatedly, like cold rain after clouds, the surprise that I wanted to make it last. Wanted to live. Just what I'd denied, time after toneless time, to the heads without faces, smooth ovals, on the ward.

“And the principal stays put for a rainy day? For an eventual retirement?”

Stays put for a tsunami
. But don't hit Ken with your world all at once. He's done well. Better than well.

“For retirement. You got it.”

§

Just after 8:00. Ken starts early. So do I. Up at 6:00, after a few hours on the couch that are less like sleep than like mildly sedated wrestling. Eyes open, closed, open—there's not much difference, the same coiled thrashing.
So tired, so fucking bloody tired, so so…
and yet. Tired's only what you're supposed to be, all you're supposed to be. Only part of what you are. What's this now? Like a three-hundred-pound doorman heaving a whiny drunk, energy bounces the drain. Force that surges from within, blooms bursting from your chest and limbs like the Hulk exploding the natural boundaries of Bruce Banner. You're
here
.

Not calm and rested, heavy-feeling. You've had the occasional solid shut-eye, eight hours of nourishing oblivion, and there's no mistaking the difference. This is adrenaline laid over exhaustion. A snort of meth or coke jacking a steady drop.

Tingling with energy you know should not be there, but still it feels so good, better and better with each second, depletion a cranky neighbour whose moans grow steadily fainter.

With just that nagging sense of guilt, shitbird cawing erratically from your shoulder—warning that the surge is wrong, to be other than flat-out wrecked is wrong, a violation against input-output regs reliable as gravity.

Which the first sip of coffee shoots you past, far out into
there
and neutron star doing. Fatigue and hesitation falling out of view, lifeless planetoids not worth recalling.

No lobby glass today. This morning's harvest is tipped recycle bins. Blue maws spilling cans, bottles, newspapers, pizza boxes, takeout cartons, and untied bags of trash passersby chuck in rather than wait till the next city bin. Tenants do, too, some of them. Flip it where it doesn't belong on their way out, save the ten steps down the hall to the garbage room.

The other nightwork's a huge black tag sprayed onto the concrete beside the garage door. A huge square, maybe eight by eight feet, it makes the perfect canvas. Primed by Owner-ordered attempts with wire brush and soapy water to remove previous tags—arm-wasting hours that smoothed the bumpy surface and sealed it with an all-over mottled gray.

This tag interesting. Black bulbous curves, surging and overlapping. Some dipping down, an overall rising. Too insistent to be called loops. Power coils thrusting against a pressure trying to contain them. A local breakthrough on Eglinton Avenue, kraken to the Owner's gray goo.

Upstairs, the phone machine tells me two fish have wandered into last night's net. Blinks of phosphorescent green as they dart inside the electronic mesh. The Owner won't be one of them. He sulks at every rental, glaring at the gouge he missed.
Yes
and
thanks
Sanskrit to him.

Nicole, Vivera's Move-In Coordinator, will be pleased to give me a tour any time before noon. And luckily, as it happens, Dr. Wyvern can fit me in at 3:15. The same middle-aged female voice as on the answering machine. But cheerful now, not droning. Needing to welcome, not dissuade.

Day is forming.
Horse and wooden cart and hunched-over driver have taken shape out of thin air and are moving, clip clop, down a fogbound street. Hop on the back and see what comes out of the mist.

Feeding time. You've let the stomach grumble long enough. Top it up and tell it you'll be back in ten hours, outside. It's less likely to pound on the door if it knows the stint ahead.

Two slices of toast with peanut butter. A banana. Glass of soy milk. A complete protein, a vegan in a line smiled approvingly. And the bigger miracle that you don't get tired of it, day after day. Still a tasty blend, three hundred and sixty-five mornings a year.

Chew it slowly by the window. Small sips. Make it last.

…luckily… as it happens… can fit
. The art of medical reception to always let the patient know his less-than-urgent complaint is being shoehorned into the healer's crammed queue, a crumb of attention strictly on compassionate grounds. Starts you off craven-grateful, a workable footing.

But we know better, don't we? A broken tooth, a loose one… faltering, out-of-it-sounding voice. What're we looking at here? A crown, a likely extraction, at a minimum. Three grand to start, with every likelihood of more from the crumbling, middle-aged mouth. Compared with a good oral soldier, wanting a check-up and cleaning, what dentist could resist?

8:50.
Nothing takes long enough
. By 9:05 I've got the sign made. Front and back panels cut from someone's flatscreen box left outside the garbage room. A steady supply of cardboard and styrofoam, all sizes. Folks will scrimp on food and clothes before they deny themselves electro-fun. Collar from some plastic strapping. Upstairs, the words are waiting for me. Written on the air in front of my eyes. I take them down in black magic marker.

§

Over on Laird, the sign carrier's in position outside Five Guys. Not shuffling with his sign, though. Sitting cross-legged on the curb, slumped and dishevelled. Collapsed Buddha needing a shave. Topknot wild and woolly, unenlightened frizz.

“They said 9:00. 9:00 to 2:00… five hours. Now they say… 11:30. 11:30, 1:30. Maybe that.”

His speech glomps like cold ketchup.

“There's no minimum shift?”

“Minimum?”

“I'll pick you up here when you're done. 1:45, say. I've got a one-hour job for you. One hour tops. But you get paid for four, no matter what. Forty bucks minimum.”

No way to tell what gets through the glaze of his eyes. Gray-green gel, like aquarium build-up.

“New rules?” he says finally, squinting up at me.

“Old ones. You'll like them better than the new.”

§

“This is nice. I can picture her here, I think.”

“Good, good. Visualizing them in the new space is always the first step.” Nicole sounds bored, sleepy even on the verge of a sale. “Take your time. I'll just be over here if you have any questions.”

She moves halfway down the corridor and stands with her head lowered, hands flat out in front of her, thumbs almost touching. Blonde hair falling forward as she checks her nails. Then swivels one hand out to the side and, with a deft ankle turn, cocks a high-heeled pump below it. Same shade exactly. Creamy purple, lilac stirred with milk. Shapes of people moving about Reception in the space beyond the door. A central location, as promised.
They tend to go fast
.

At seven grand a month to start—the bottom of the rate schedule she slid across in the office—probably not so fast. It's the Basic Rooms in government-regulated homes that get snapped up, that have three-year waiting lists. And no need for saleswomen.

Turn back to the window. Bird feeder on a nearly leafless sapling. Sparrows and finches darting between it and a large blue spruce. Stocking up under a pewter sky. Blue carpet, stains driven deep. Cream walls, the nail holes gone. A bigger, cleaner room than Maude's upstairs. But same basic layout.

Single bed. Pine table and chair. Water glass, coffee mug. No pictures.

Vivera's Mad Monk. A strange case, but our easiest resident ever, no question. Seldom speaks. No, not a vow of silence exactly, but yeah, mostly mute. Don't knock except for meals.

Right. With Jordan's payoff lasting what, two years? Ken screaming holy ass-rape with each month's auto-withdrawal. Doing his blue-suited best to prevent nest-egg suicide.

Closing window thoughts, chum. Hear them and pick up the pace.

“I think it's time to see upstairs. The… secure ward, I think you called it.”

Opens and closes her eyes two times, slowly, like someone roused from sleep. Lashes coated black and knobbed like tulip anthers. “Our Memory Gardens, the second
floor
, is always part of the tour. But, I'm sorry, didn't you say your mother—”

“My wife.”

“I'm sorry, your wife.” Touching my arm. “Didn't you say your wife was still living with you? For someone still capable of semi-independent living, it would be very unusual to graduate directly to Memory Gardens. Unless she's…”